Traditional activists frequently tell us about their ideas for blogs, prank pages, internet petition drives, or online fundraising efforts. Most of these ideas never become reality because the activists, many of whom are excellent at working social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook, have never learned to transform their ideas into their own web pages or web sites.

Enter Wordpress. Unlike other popular hosted blogging platforms Wordpress has a special characteristic: It gives users a free easy-to-use, but powerful starting point before it slowly, but enthusiastically teaches its users the most popular and versatile languages of webcraft, such as html, css, php, and sql, and provides for them a framework for building websites far beyond the limitations of mere blogging. Wordpress was not designed to create web designers and web developers out of bloggers, but in many, many cases it does just that. If you don’t believe us, please reference the community of plugin developers and themers at Wordpress.org who began as users of the platform or the number of sites that even zealous advocates of competing CMS systems like Joomla or Drupal choose to develop on Wordpress because it is the first CMS they learned and really the only one they feel comfortable with “under the hood.”

Here’s how I believe that Wordpress can take even the newest online activists from beginner to effortless master of online activism in just a couple of months.

1. First, the activist begins by using a Wordpress powered hosted blog service like Wordpress.com or Eric Odom’s Blogivists. This is similar to signing up for a service like Facebook or Myspace, which is just to say that the learning curve associated with getting started will be very, very low. Most hosted services provide some kind of free (as in beer) option for users to begin tinkering with. A user should be able to get immediate results within a couple minutes of registering with the hosted service. Over the next couple of weeks, the activist will learn and understand the Wordpress standard interface or “backend” and begin to get a grasp of the issues involved with designing a Wordpress blog of their own, such as the differences between pages and posts and how categories and tags are used.

2. Now after awhile, our activist-turned-hosted-Wordpress-blogger will hear about thousands of plugins for Wordpress that would make his or her site much, much snazzier. Unfortunately, those plugins won’t always be available on the hosted platforms, so the activist will need to make the jump towards self-hosted blogging. Users who start with a different blogging platform such as Google’s Blogger often have to start over and learn an entirely new system when they want to begin self-hosted blogging; which makes this step a much more considerable one. It’s at this stage that users typically learn a little bit about FTP as well as CPANEL and phpmyadmin, but they can be assured that their solid foundation in how to blog will remain the same because the essential experience of using Wordpress won’t change too radically… in fact, they’ll probably be able to find and activate the magic plugin that motivated them to move to a self-hosted blog by using the same backend interface that they’ve been using to post and respond to comments.

3. It’s at this stage that the activist begins to discover Wordpress’ simple approach to themes and starts to realize the full potential of Wordpress. To begin with the activist will typically pick a theme created by someone else but licensed under GPL… and then learn to hunt through the CSS to substitute his or her own logos or change colors and font-styles to customize the look and feel of the site. In the process, the person will be learning html and css the only really effective way: by using it. There are a couple of good Wordpress theme creation and alteration tutorials available free online. (The team at Ithemes.com has a premium tutorial on how to change around an existing theme available at their training site, WebDesign.com.) The tutorial is Wordpress theme specific, but actually a fairly good primer on CSS in general and users will be able to select one of the thousands of pre-constructed themes and then radically change its colors and element attributes after tinkering a bit.

4. Here’s where the new Builder theme enables Wordpress to fulfill its potential. See, there’s a difference between altering a theme’s element attributes and substituting images on the one hand and creating a new layout on the other. Traditionally web designers tended to learn table-based web-design first before moving on to superior, but often more difficult to grasp, CSS-based layouts. Today, it’s almost difficult to find resources on learning HTML table-based design and many, many an ambitious spirit has been reduced to insurmountable frustration by the materials available for learning CSS layouts. We used to recommend people use the 960gs system as an initial crutch to be able to layout sites effectively without fully mastering CSS layouts. Builder, however, follows the true spirit of Wordpress and allows our activist turned blogger to create new layouts by using the tools he or she is already comfortable with in a slightly different fashion. The administrative backend is used to laydown elements of a Wordpress layout like images and the loop with a click of the mouse and much of the layout process can involve placing text widget boxes, a quick and extremely versatile approach to constructing a layout using the familiar widget process. This is important because advanced CSS layouts are the obstacle that cause many, many Wordpress enthusiasts end their journey towards effortless web creation; the road to theme mastery without the gentle transition provided by Builder is rocky, indeed. Other systems that require mastery of Smarty or other templating enginers have an even lower rate of people who advance in skill beyond this point.

5. Using Builder to do layouts, our activist learns about the role of page templates and loops and can now not only change the look of his or her website, but drastically change its organization and really the entirety of its presentation. Having learned the Wordpress approach, the activist will be able to transform just about anything he can draw on a piece of paper before laying out in Photoshop or GIMP and finally transforming his or her vision into a Wordpress site. It’s at this stage that the use can extend it with similar tools that also follow the Wordpress approach like user profiles and social media engine, Buddypress, or forums engine, bbPress. Along the way, the user has seen more than a bit of php and might just decide to use it to create new content types with WP PODS. We recently discovered PODS through the Ithemes gang and Benjamin Bradley (who seems to be something of a libertarian, BTW), but it basically allows you to create your own content systems the way Content Construction Kit does with Drupal. It is at this point that Wordpress users start breaking beyond the page and post view of web design, but the transition is, once again, gradual as POD makes excellent use of the Wordpress backend and Wordpress terminology. Users who simply start with such concepts by beginning with other CMS systems will often fail to survive the initial challenge, but the activist who takes the Wordpress path is able to generate *almost* any basic site quickly and with a great deal of creative control.

We’re concerned that because we’ve justified Wordpress based on its educational benefit as a user moves from Step 1 to Step 5, above, that many activists will think that the system won’t perform for them early on. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wordpress is the easiest and most effective CMS for search engine optimization I’ve ever used. Even without the excellent free SEO plugins available, the blog platform does a great job of introducing an activists idea’s to the world through Google and RSS. Almost immediately activists will begin to attract traffic from the search engines and by the time they work their way to step 5, many activists will have developed a successful following that can appreciate our activists newly developed web skills. Best yet, Wordpress with caching plugins scales as well or better than any other open source CMS system we’ve used. At the end of the day, that means that Wordpress is not only better for beginners, but also better for experienced pros looking to deal efficiently with considerable traffic and the growing pains of success.

Finally, while it isn’t essential, we’d like to point out that the open source Wordpress community doesn’t seem to be as openly Leftist (or political for that matter) as the crowd surrounding Drupal, our second favorite system for simple projects. Wordpress emphasizes “free” while the community still allows and even cheers a number of module and theme developers who sell their creations for premium prices.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be launching tutorials for each of the five stages taking any activist who’d like to try his hand and webcraft a journey from Stage 1 to Stage 5. Let’s see if we can’t enable a few activists to turn those website dreams into something real.