What is WordPress, and What Does it Do? | The Basics of Creating a Website

WordPress is a widely operated CMS (Content Management System) for creating blogs/websites; almost 70% of internet websites use it.

What is the WordPress Content Management System?

The WordPress content management system is a free website builder focused on creating many types of blogs today. Its founder, Matt Mullenweg, developed this software under modifiable code under PHP, MySQL, and GPL licenses.

WP has grown tremendously because of its licensing, ease of use, and good content manager. Another reason for the rapid growth is the large community of developers and designers responsible for creating plugins and themes used by 200 million users in 2009.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, also has a free blog hosting service. The hosting service simplifies the management of pages outside of the regular chronological order of web content. It offers a complete content management system from an essential blog management software.

Although the community developed most of the project, some employees closely related to the Automattic company contributed to WP. It also has a community to test every newly released version. The versions under development are called Beta or Release Candidates.

WordPress (WP) is open-source software with a GPLv2 license that works with the MYSQL database written in PHP language. Since it is open-source software, developers make and publish many Plugins.

It is straightforward to create a blog using WordPress. You can make a completely free website with many themes and plugins.

To explain WP briefly, it is free software that enables the creation of a website or blog without requiring programming knowledge.

Features of WordPress

WordPress was born to create a personal, elegant, and well-built publishing system. PHP, MySQL-based, and licensed under the GPL, this software pays special attention to aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

With the configuration set to use one blog per site or setup, it is possible to set up several blogs using a single or few databases with some fixes.

Other features are as follows;

• It provides easy installation, upgrades, updates, and customization.
• It includes sustainability and security with automatic updates.
• It provides support for multiple authors or users along with various user profiles by creating different levels of permissions.
• It supports multiple blog structures.
• There is support for creating static pages.
• It can classify articles and static pages with categories, subcategories, and tags.
• It enables reverting published content to draft.
• It supports password-protected content.
• There is support for broadcasting via e-mail.
• It supports importing all content from other different blog structures with RSS.
• It supports automatic draft saving during the preparation process of articles, so there is no loss of possible connection errors.
• It allows for the sharing of trackback and pingback communication tools between blogs.
• It allows editing permalinks via mod_rewrite.
• It allows articles to be published on different platforms with RSS and Atom connections.

Structure

WordPress is a web publishing system based on entries sorted by date, among many other features, in addition to static or dynamic pages. To clarify, one should create a website’s structure and visual design based on the chosen theme and system.

WP’s philosophy adheres to elegance, simplicity, and W3C recommendations but can vary according to the theme. The system provides management and execution processes and plugins and widgets to use. Classifying posted content using categories and tags similar to keywords is also possible.

Multiple Blog Infrastructure

Although WordPress supports one blog per installation, creating multiple blogs in different directories using the same database is possible.

WordPress Multisite aims to facilitate creating and managing multiple blogs in a single setup, enabling the design of numerous blogging systems.

WP Multisite enables anyone with a website who wants to create their blog community to control and manage all blogs from a single admin environment.

WordPress Themes

WordPress themes are design templates used to create the look and structure of blog design. The design of these themes is published after they are examined, checked, and officially approved. Also, a central official community of professional users is running these things.

Widgets

WordPress includes a Widget system that offers lots of flexibility for the design and structure of personal or corporate blogs. The only disadvantage of widgets is that they are incompatible with all themes because the developer who designed the piece decides this.

WordPress Plugins

Several paid and free plugins develop beyond a simple blog, making it a flexible and practical general-purpose system.

The most popular WP plugins are;

• Yoast SEO
• WPForms
• Constant Contact
• SeedProd
• MemberPress
• UpdraftPlus
• WP Rocket
• Sucuri
• Google Workspace
• SEMRush
• LiveChat
• WP Mail SMTP
• Insert Headers and Footers
• WPML or Polylang
• WooCommerce
• Broken Link Checker
• Akismet

What are WordPress.com and WordPress.org?

There are two different platforms on which you can use WordPress. These;

1. WordPress.com
2. WordPress.org

1) It is a platform that allows you to create a free website with the extension domainname.wordpress.com without needing to purchase hosting and domain names.

2) If you want to create a fully controllable website or blog, it is the platform that allows you to install a standalone WordPress by purchasing a hosting and domain name, downloading the WP installation files to your computer, and then copying these files onto the server you bought hosting from.

What Types of Websites Can One Create with WordPress?

Many well-known websites use the WP infrastructure. So, what websites can we create after installing WordPress?

• Trade Sites
• Job Sites
• Forum Sites
• Blog Sites
• Social Networking Sites
• Membership Sites
• News Sites
• Portfolio Sites

WordPress Sample Site

An example of a website using WP is The Official Microsoft Blog. This website is its official blog and uses the WordPress CMS system.

Open the Microsoft Blog website and click Right Click / View Page Source.

On the page source that opens, press Ctrl + F.

Type into the search container and press Enter. As shown in the image below, on line 56, you can see that Microsoft uses the WP infrastructure in its blog structure.