A Brief Introduction to WordPress for SAS® Programmers Andra Northup, Advanced Analytic Designs, Inc., Davis, California ABSTRACT WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by more than 26.4% of the top 10 million websites as of April 2016. In fact, SAS® blogs (hosted at http://blogs.sas.com) use the WordPress platform. If you are considering starting a blog to share your love of SAS® or to raise the profile of your business and are considering using WordPress, join us for a brief introduction to WordPress for SAS® programmers.

INTRODUCTION A content management system (CMS) is software to create, edit, review and publish digital content. Many content management systems offer a Web-based GUI, enabling publishers to access the CMS online using only a Web browser. In addition to a WYSIWYG editor, most provide file uploading, image resizing, page categories and tags, user accounts (editor, moderator, administrator), and more. Tools to index and search documents and to specify keywords and other metadata for search engine crawlers are also widely available. The ultimate benefit of utilizing a content management system is the ability to create and publish web pages with little or no knowledge of web design, HTML, or CSS

Why Choose WordPress The universe of content management systems is constantly expanding and includes other well-known options such as Joomla and Drupal. The ultimate decision is personal based on assessment of the options in light of your goals. WordPress does offer many reasons to choose it. It is free, open source software, used for sites ranging from small blogs to enterprise level sites. There are many professionally designed themes available, including over two thousand free themes in the official WordPress Theme Directory. Also, many themes are designed to be responsive, i.e., mobile device friendly. There are also myriad plugins (both free and paid) that can expand functionality, and provide different styles of layouts. And, of course, there is the huge, active WordPress community, including not only the online community but also many local user and meetup groups. The dynamic WordPress community shares information with one another for the advancement of the platform, which is a big reason WordPress has a larger market share than Drupal or Joomla

First Things If you have not already done so, select and purchase your domain name: the ‘you’ in you.com. Consider the words or phrases that best describe the business or activity for which you are creating a site. A growing variety of domain extensions are available. “.com”, “.net”, and “.biz” are among the most widely recognized. The country code “.us” is a relatively new extension. More extensions are added all the time, but you may want to stick to one of the better known. When you build a website and want other people to see it, you will need to publish, i.e. upload, it with a web hosting service that stores your website files in web servers connected to a fast network. When someone types in your web address, the Internet connects to the web server holding your website files and then transfers your website information back to their computer. From there they can surf and view the pages of your website. You can think of your web hosting as the “office space” you rent for your website. Without hosting services, you don't have a place for your files to reside, so your domain would be like a disconnected phone number in the phone directory, and your site files would have nowhere to stay.

INSTALLING WORDPRESS Your host will use cPanel, a Linux-based web hosting control panel, to provide a graphical interface and tools. From the cPanel for your domain, install WordPress. Many hosts use the Softaculous Apps Installer. Simply find Softaculous in your cPanel, and select WordPress.

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