Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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a simple division between WordPress EZ, for instance, and WordPress Pro—to make up a couple of
names—and we'll all be able to communicate with each other more easily.
Until that day, we're all stuck talking about WordPress.com and WordPress.org. No doubt you
understand the difference by now—but, also without a doubt, you'll have trouble explaining it to
outsiders.
Choosing WordPress.org
In Chapter 1, “Getting Started with WordPress,” we provided a brief description of the differences
between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Here, we deal more with why you would want to
choose one over the other.
We begin with WordPress.org; it was first, it has many tens of millions of blogs, and it's what most
people mean when they say “WordPress.”
Wikipedia handles it accordingly; the WikiPedia article on WordPress is entirely about WordPress
.org, with WordPress.com handled in a separate entry. At this writing, though, Wikipedia also
exemplifies and exacerbates the confusion. The Wikipedia entry calls WordPress.org “self-hosted
blog software,” which is ridiculous: Software can't host itself; it's hosted on a web server.
In explaining the differences, Automattic focuses on technical aspects—and they are important.
WordPress.org allows you to change the code of the WordPress software itself and to upload
themes and plug-ins. WordPress.org is also supported by a great community (which has offered so
much information, for the better part of a decade now, that it can be hard to find a single, definitive,
precise, and relatively up-to-date answer—thus this topic).
On the negative side, WordPress.org requires you to pay a web host, to have more technical knowl-
edge, to stop spam (usually by running one or more plug-ins), to back up your database, and to han-
dle upgrades to new versions of the WordPress software.
Inherent in all this you have to understand what hosting is, what a database is, what different
kinds of spam are for blogs, and much more. You have to understand these issues not just in a gen-
eral way, but well enough to make decisions and take action on them.
These are serious issues. You can completely trash, damage, destroy, and delete some or all of your
blog, or you can make mistakes that allow spam and malicious software to do it for you. Not only
can your blog be lost, but your reputation and, if the blog is for an organization, your organization's
reputation can be affected too. (An IT consultant whose WordPress blog is lost forever due to mis-
takes is not going to find it easy to recover.)
However, this description doesn't cover the four most important issues in deciding to go with
WordPress.org: making money with your blog, Automattic's ads on your site, tapping the
WordPress community, and getting the right host.
Making Money with Your Blog
You can't make money from a WordPress.com blog. (At least, not directly—you can
promote
your
book, for instance, on a WordPress.com blog, but you can't
sell
it there.) Automattic bans e-com-
merce on your WordPress.com blog as well as Google AdSense ads and extensive links to the
Amazon.com partner program and other advertising and partner programs.
