Basic wordpress questions
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Hi. I have several simple WordPress sites that I maintain, and I have been using the platform for a number of years, but I still have some simple questions that would probably be very easy for other to answer.
1) Why .com and .org? One day I will remember which to log into, or which to post questions to. Why do both exist? What is the difference? Anything I need to know about, or should I just concentrate on my .com sites and forums?
2) When I log into my sites, and start to work or manage a site, I first reach a blue-and-white colored, sort of simple seeming interface. Then, I have to manually scroll down and choose WP administrator. This seems redundant–if I have logged in, I must be the administrator. Why are there two alternate and similar but slightly different routes to manage sites (the blue and white one and the administrator one)? It seems redundant and confusing. Could I configure WordPress to bring me directly to the administrator page, so that I don’t have to perform the additional step of navigating through the first interface?
OK, I guess that’s all for now. The whole platform is very powerful and accessible, and I am grateful for it, but I also think it’s somewhat unnecessarily complex…perhaps because it has evolved over time, and has to be many things to many people?
Ideas?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
1) Why .com and .org? One day I will remember which to log into, or which to post questions to. Why do both exist? What is the difference? Anything I need to know about, or should I just concentrate on my .com sites and forums?
WordPress is open source software, meaning it’s free for anyone to use and even modify to suit their needs. To use this software you need your own server, or a hosting provider where you can install the software. That is what’s called a self-hosted site.
WordPress.org is the website where this software lives. That’s where you can download and get help with it, and where the entire community who contributes to the software interacts with each other. You don’t need a WordPress.org account to use the software, but you do need it to post in the forums or otherwise participate in the community there.
WordPress.com is a platform where we use our own version of the WordPress software to offer free website hosting to people. In the past this was mostly for bloggers, but we’re getting more and more business websites here as well every day. WordPress.com requires you to have an account to use it, and unlike the open source software, you cannot edit the source code of WordPress.com directly.
You can see a more detailed breakdown here:
https://wordpress.com/com-vs-org/
2) When I log into my sites, and start to work or manage a site, I first reach a blue-and-white colored, sort of simple seeming interface. Then, I have to manually scroll down and choose WP administrator.
The blue and white interface you see is the new Calypso dashboard for WordPress.com. It’s a new dashboard that contains most of the functions you’ll also find in WP-Admin. Calypso is written in an entirely new codebase, and uses JavaScript rather than PHP (which is the code WP-Admin uses).
If you’d like to learn more about the reasons why we did this you can see these posts:
Could I configure WordPress to bring me directly to the administrator page, so that I don’t have to perform the additional step of navigating through the first interface?
Calypso is the default on all WordPress.com sites and cannot be switched off, so if you prefer to use WP-Admin instead you’ll either need to use the link in the My Sites menu, or bookmark the direct link in your browser.
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Thanks for the replies. That explains a great deal. I will try to do everything from the Calypso interface. That would probably be the easiest and most up to date. Thanks again.
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A few options are at this time only available in WP-Admin, but I would encourage you to give Calypso a try, and let us know if you run into any bugs or miss any feature in particular.
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