Meet the LISA '12 Instructors: David Blank-Edelman on Implementing WordPress

As we continue ramping up to LISA '12, we've posted a series of interviews with event organizers and instructors. In this installment, Matt Simmons interviews David Blank-Edelman.

It is my extreme pleasure to work for the gentleman I interviewed for this article. David Blank-Edelman is a well-known system administrator, author of several books on Perl specific to system administration, has been involved with USENIX for many years, was presented with the 2009 Outstanding Achievement Award, and serves on the USENIX Board of Directors. This year at LISA '12, Blank-Edelman is teaching a class called Implementing Wordpress for SysAdmins. Recently I asked him some questions about the class and about Wordpress in general:

Matt: Wordpress used to be a simple blog platform. What kinds of new uses are you seeing with it?

David: Though WordPress still remains one of the premier blogging platforms; I think the days of using it just for this are probably long gone. Many moons ago, people figured out, "Hey, this is pretty good and easy to use software for serving up all sorts of content and not just blogs." And over time as the developers of WordPress added more and more functionality to support its generic use, people started to realize that it could be used as a general purpose Content Management System (CMS). As a result, I think I'm finding it used as the "back end" for many different kinds of website, including large installations like the New York Times, CNN, Mozilla, William Shatner's personal website, and so on. One practical result of this is that when someone comes to me and says, "I need a website," WordPress is one of the first tools I reach for to help them.

Matt: What are some of the pros and cons of managing your own WordPress installation versus going with a hosting provider?

David: To answer this question, I think it is useful to distinguish between the different possible installations and hosting provider choices. There are hosting providers the biggest being WordPress.com — that you sign up for as WordPress as a service. There are providers that let you install your own copy of WordPress and customize by installing plugins to your heart's content. Some of the providers at that level (e.g. WPEngine) are optimized specifically for serving WordPress. And then there is the other possibility to run WordPress on your own server, locally or perhaps some VPS you rent some place. When you are choosing between these options, you are basically twiddling two knobs: control and responsibility.

With the first option, you don't get very much control over the site, some customizations plus anything content related, but in return you can use the service without having to worry about how it is run, how to fix it when it is broken, how to make it scale, etc. In the middle tier, you get some more options about what is installed (e.g. plugins, your own custom look and feel) and access to the underlying code. But you don't have to worry about the lower-level stuff like the OS, DB, or web server configuration. And if you work with a company that specializes in WordPress hosting, you are very likely to be able to get support from people who know how WordPress works and how to debug problems with it. With the last choice, you get to control the horizontal and the vertical, but in return when a dialog box pops up recommending you ask your system administrator to deal with a problem, you get to go fetch a mirror.

Matt: There are a lot of Content Management Systems out there. What sets WordPress apart and makes it so appealing?

David: I think there are a couple of things that make it appealing. The first is its developers go to a considerable amount of effort to make the experience of interacting with system a pleasant one. There is considerable thought put into making things "user friendly" and easy to use out of the box by neophytes. This means the learning curve isn't nearly as steep as it is with other systems like Drupal that don't necessarily have the same focus. The other thing that I really appreciate is there is a huge ecosystem of people using and developing code in, for, and with WordPress. This makes a tremendous difference when you are trying to figure out how to accomplish something.

Matt: What are your three favorite WordPress plugins?

David: Oooh, hard question. In my class I compare WordPress plugins to crack because there are so many of them and the temptation is Pokemon-like where you just want to collect more and more. Here are three from the list I look at in my class:

• BackupBuddy: for automated backups of your WordPress site
• Gravity Forms: for easy creation of any sort of web form
• Redirection: for setting up redirects for easy URL control

Matt: In a sentence, why should someone take your class at LISA12?

David: To avoid a run-on sentence, I'm going to cheat and answer in two: Some day someone is going to walk into your office, approach you at a school picnic, or a club, or place of worship you attend and ask you to create a web site — WordPress is a good tool to have at the ready. This is a chance to learn about it one sysadmin to another.

You can check out David's class on 1:30 on Tuesday afternoon in the Nautilus 5 room.

Also Read:

• LISA '11: William LeFebvre on 25 Years of LISA 
• Meet the LISA '12 Instructors: William LeFebvre on Using Amazon Web Services
• Meet the LISA '12 Speakers: Geoff Halprin (on infrastructure provisioning, agile software development, and the one word that describes system administration)
• Meet the LISA '12 Speakers: Selena Deckelmann talks about Education vs. Training
• Meet the LISA '12 Instructors: Stuart Kendrick talks about the new Root Cause Analysis class
• Meet the LISA '12 Instructors: Steven Murawski talks PowerShell Fundamentals
• Meet the LISA '12 Lightning Talks Coordinator: Lee Damon
• Meet the LISA '12 Speakers: Owen DeLong offers practical advice for first-time attendees
• Meet the LISA '12 Program Committee: Mike Ciavarella