What you will learn: In this article, we’ll summarize how the popular CMS, WordPress works internally. We’ll focus on the technicality behind the lustrous posts and know them better by following a step-by-step approach. We’ll delve into the critical elements that form the WordPress Website’s basic blocks to get a better insight into the WordPress CMS.
WordPress has been a popular choice for CMS in the market, claiming to be 37% of the websites. The reason being, ease of use mainly and robustness, scalability, community support. It is quite easy for a naïve technical user to start a website in WordPress. But it’s imperative to understand WordPress web development more deeply; for domain expertise and better results. For example, if a website’s performance is downgrading, a creator can optimize it only if he knows where to look out for the issue.
Understanding the WordPress Architecture
WordPress runs on the PHP and MySQL stack on a LINUX server. It is highly suited for blogs and medium-sized businesses. As you can see below, is a schematic representation of the WordPress architecture. Let’s list down some of its features, pros, and cons.
- PHP is an open-source server-side scripting language. It consists of the interpreter, which processes the PHP code and returns HTML files to the webserver.
- As you can see in the diagram, whenever a user requests a web page written in PHP, the PHP code moves to the interpreter for processing. It is then populated with data from the MySQL database and is given a template via the WordPress theme.
- After the code is processed, the files are now in the respective HTML, CSS, JPEG forms. These files are placed in the web server, which renders it to the browser.
- WordPress is an open-source CMS and is highly scalable. It is also extensible with third-party integrations for various purposes.
- It has numerous APIs and life cycle hooks, which can be customized to cater to our needs. Such as custom post type, custom taxonomies, shortcodes, widgets, REST, HTTP, settings, and a lot more.
- However, WordPress’s security features are a concern. According to a report, 90% of the websites hacked in 2019 were WordPress Websites. Check a detailed description here.
- It may be challenging to choose a CMS for your enterprise.
WordPress Website Basic Blocks
As mentioned earlier, it is the PHP framework that forms the basis of the WordPress website. It consists of posts, plugins, and themes as the basic blocks. Let’s see how they shape the basics of the WordPress website.
1. What are the Themes?
A theme is a collection of PHP files that produces a graphical interface along with the underlying design. A theme basically constitutes the design part of your website. When you change your theme, the design and layout of your site changes too. WordPress offers an enumerable number of free theme options and premium ones as well. Since WordPress is open-source software, many WordPress web development companies offer custom theme development services.
2. What are Plugins?
WordPress core is entirely customizable, and it provides all the necessary functionalities. However, websites often require additional or extended functionality and support, and plugins serve the purpose. Hence, plugins are PHP scripts that extend the functionality of WordPress to enhance the overall experience further.
You will have an option to add new plugins via the add new button. You can also manage plugins, that is, deactivate, delete, and update.
3. What are Posts?
Posts are your piece of writings or articles or blog posts that form the central content part. For instance, if the website is a poetry blog, every poem is a post. The Add New button helps you create a new post. You can sort your posts into various relevant categories of your choice. All other CRUD operations related to posts can be handled here.
4. What are WordPress pages?
We can see an option called pages in WordPress; pages make up the static content on your website. Pages like, contact us, privacy policy, which rarely changes can be made static using the pages feature of WordPress.
5. Comments in WordPress
Comments software is embedded along with the WordPress software and looks something like below. They are enabled for all the posts. The admin, however, can approve or decline comments as per convenience.
6. Controlling Users in WordPress
A WordPress website can have a bunch of users with different privileges. It is the admin who can add users to the website/blog and assign a role. The access level is decided by the role assigned. The user panel is as shown in the diagram below. The roles include admin, author, and so on.
7.Appearance in WordPress
Appearance is the place where you customize the design of your website and looks like below. The important ones include menus, widgets, navbars, etc.
- Menus: Menu is the way you want your posts to be categorized. For instance, in a technical blog, you want all the C programming blogs to be under one menu and JAVA in the other. Also, you can perform all the CRUD operations with menus.
- Widgets: Widgets are the content that makes up your site’s headers, footers, and sidebars. We have often come across the author’s information and sign up forms in the sidebars; they are called widgets.
- Additional CSS: Other than the existing CSS and style files that are applied, you can use additional CSS properties to your website by writing it here. This comes in handy when certain themes are restrictive regarding the CSS; in that case, you can add your code.
Wrapping Up
I’m hopeful that we have a better insight into WordPress Website after this article. We have seen the architecture and WordPress website basics. WordPress is a popular CMS, no doubt, but there are other CMSs in the market for business/eCommerce needs. Whereas WordPress is suitable for small to medium-sized businesses, you might not want to consider WordPress for larger ones. Make sure to check the inline linked resources for better understanding!
