WordPress Basics

If you are new to WordPress and wants to build a site or blog with it, this post will explain WordPress basics to help you to understand what actually WordPress is and how WordPress works.

WordPress is an online, free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and mySql. It is most powerful and easiest CMS for blogs and websites.

With WordPress,We can design and develop simple WordPress sites with 4-5 pages, or more complex sites with hundreds of pages and huge number of custom menus.

WordPress is the most popular CMS used in the world.There are more 23K plugins are available in WordPress. These are the few WordPress facts which are really amazing and makes you to use WordPress.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com allows you to create free websites hosted with WordPress. You can upload all the data into WordPress server and use it for free. Generally wordpress.com blog has naming like name.wordpress.com. Use this system, if you don’t want to pay for hosting. If you are in a wordpress basics learning stage, you can use wordpress.com to improve your skills.

You can buy good domain and use that domain with WordPress as custom domain. For instance blogger.com or blogspot.com.

WordPress.org

With WordPress.org, you can host your own blog/website. Here you will find free WordPress software that you can download and install on your own web server.This is called as Self-hosted website.

All the hosting provide you freedom to install WordPress on it. To install WordPress on your domain you can use Quick Install or Fantastico option. All the files you will use on your blog will be uploaded on your own hosting and there will be separate sql database for your blog.

Building blocks of WordPress

Theme, Plugins, Widgets, Content Files are main building blocks of WordPress. We are explaining all these building blocks as a part of WordPress basics tutorial.

Theme

Once WordPress is installed a theme needs to be built or modified. A theme is an interface design with background colors, headings,footers, sidebars and other features. There may be one or more templates, and one or more style sheets. The style sheets contain the details about how the page should look.

Plugins

Plugins allows you to add additional features like signups, subscriptions, photo galleries, contact form. Some sites needs just 3-4 plugins , some needs more than 10, all depends on how beautifully interactively you build your site.

Widgets

Widgets are small scripts which are used to organize small tasks, like showing Archives or Latest Posts in the sidebar of a blog.

Content Files

Once you build the site, you can add content to the pages. With WordPress you can easily add pages, organize categories, create custom menus etc.. These things are more time consuming when you are coding with HTML.

Testing

After you add content to the site, test the site in different browsers and devices like cell phones. Make adjustments to the themes and style sheets if necessary.