Welcome to FreePress! The intent of this site is to demonstrate best practices and recipes for creating magical publications and digital experiences using the the FreePress approach. When you don’t know how to do something, this demo site is the first place to check — and if you don’t see a way to do what you want here, please let us know and we’ll help you figure out how to achieve the result you need.

We also use this site to document architectural decisions behind our approach to building sites using WordPress. If you don’t know already, FreePress carefully curates WordPress to leverage its extraordinarily powerful suite of tools most effectively. WordPress is the most scaled digital publishing toolset in the world, and the most fully featured because it is an open source platform — its power comes from people making contributions for the good of the community.

But with great power, comes great responsibility. While with most CMSes, the frustration comes from not being able to do what you want, with WordPress, the problem is too many ways to do what you want! We’ve done the hard work of evaluating the often myriad approaches to accomplishing a result, and we’ve gone deep into how each new plugin interacts with the whole to find the best way to accomplish every possible result and we present all of that information here. We hope to save others the time.

Ultimately, the goal is to get more done faster, without the cruft that so often piles up over time bringing new development to a screeching halt.

Additionally, as we often say, the greatest creativity often comes from the right constraints.

So please, read and enjoy — most pages here will be kept up to date and form a living compendium of knowledge. If you’re new to the FreePress approach, then we suggest you start with these three posts to acquaint yourself with the concepts behind WordPress’s Full Site Editing.