Website and content management with WordPress

The thesis was completed for The Finnish School Library Association. The first objective for the thesis was to research WordPress and get familiar with both its features and possibilities as a web content management system. The second objective was to create a new website for The Finnish School Library Association that meets their new requirements and uses WordPress as the content management system. Both objectives were met and the website was released in February 2009.

During the last few years, people and companies who manage websites have started increas-ingly to use web content management systems to make updating websites easier. These con-tent management systems separate the actual content, the layout and the graphical exterior from each other. There is often no longer need to know HTML to modify the content of the website. In most cases web content management systems also support multiple users and user privileges and that way make it simpler to have several updaters.

WordPress is an open source web content management system. The development of Word-Press started in 2003 and it is mostly used to manage blogs. Being an open source project, WordPress is free to install and use. WordPress is written in PHP and it uses MySQL database to store its data.

The Finnish School Library Association offers means to communicate for its members, organ-izes meetings and arranges study trips. The association uses its website as the main communi-cation channel between the board and the members. The need for this project arose when the old website of the association did not meet the board’s requirements any longer.