Just a short background to the web site for those of you who may be interested in the tech stuff behind it.
I’ve created many web sites in recent years mainly using professional web site creation software, but also handcrafting html, java script and asp. This time I wanted a much easier task and my hosting company suggested I look at WordPress.
WordPress describes itself as a blog tool and publishing package and is currently used by 60 million web site developers. It is free software developed by hundreds of volunteers and the basic package can be enhanced by using software plug-ins, of which there are currently over 17,000. The total number of downloads of these plug-ins is now approaching a quarter of a billion! 
Although you can get some sort of web site up and running in a few minutes, it has taken me many, many hours to get to to where we are today. Even deciding which of the 17,000 plug-ins you may want, and deciding on what each does, is a mammoth task. At this moment I have used only 7 plug-ins – so a few more to explore yet!
The post important plug-in is bbPress which adds the forum functionality to the web site. This was not my first choice as BuddyPress is the most popular forum software. However, I was struggling to get it to work easily with WordPress and it is designed to provide social networking rather than a simple forum – and I didn’t want another Facebook!
So, the web site currently uses bbPress, which although doesn’t have half the functionality of BuddyPress does offer useful forums, which I can get to work. 
