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WordPress is database-driven, so it’s not quite as fast at serving up individual pages as a CMS that writes static files to the server. However, there are a number of things you can do to improve its performance, starting with caching dynamic output to static pages. I’ll explain how caching works and show you how to set it up. I’ll also show you some ways to identify performance problems in your installation.

Most of the time, working with plugins is straightforward. The plugin developer has written a readme file with comprehensive description of the plugin’s features, good installation instructions, and a FAQ. The installation goes smoothly and what you see matches the plugin’s screenshots.

WordPress has five built-in user roles with escalating permissions. The basic role and notification systems work well for many blogs. For more complex content management, you can change the fields in the basic user profile, modify roles, create whole new roles, and add notifications using a couple of plugins. I’ll look at the built-in features first, and then show you the plugins required to extend them.

There’s a lot of overlap between theme and plugin development in WordPress. Both themes and plugins rely on core functions and APIs, especially the Options API. In this chapter, you’ll learn about these common functions and development concepts, and how WordPress theme and plugin files are organized.

If you’re switching to WordPress from some other platform, you probably need to import some content. There is a plethora of WordPress plugins to import content from other blogging and content management systems. In addition, the WordPress API makes it relatively easy to import content from any MySQL-based content management system.