What is Wordpress?     

Wordpress as the name suggests is a platform that allows you to publish your words. The Wordpress software is available for free from the www.wordpress.org  website and it adds a new feather to the saying, the absolute best things can be free. Most people have a false impression on Wordpress that it is a blogging tool/software and nothing more than that. Whenever you need a personal or a company blog, just install it, publish some posts and you are ready to go. But, Wordpress is much more than just a blogging platform it is actually a Content Management System (CMS). It is very well capable of doing all the things that other CMS’s do with ease. It is very easy to create a website using Wordpress, download the software from the website www.wordpress.org install it and your brand new website is ready. To manage your website with Wordpress no programming knowledge is required however to install Wordpress a little technical knowledge is required.

Managing Content in Wordpress

There are two main content types that come by default with Wordpress, a post and a page. A post is your blog post that powers the main content of the website. The post is the place where you will put in your experiences, new inventions, basically whatever you like in your words and publish it in the site. The page is for the static content of your website like an ‘About us’ page or the ‘Terms of Policy’ page. The best part of Wordpress is that it is not limited to what comes by default; it can be extended by using themes (that control the presentation of the website) or by a huge number of plugins (that add additional functionality to the Wordpress) that are available.

Customizing the look of Wordpress with Themes

The themes control the visual representation of the website and there a numerous amount of the themes available with absolutely free of cost and there are also a lot of themes available for a small amount also. But, as always with Wordpress, you are not limited to what is readily available; if you are not satisfied with any of the free or the paid themes of Wordpress, you can always develop your own theme with your brand.

The themes control how the posts will be displayed, the number of sidebars available for placing the widgets (content that can be placed on the website sidebars), and the default widgets that are displayed, how the tags are displayed with the posts, how the categories goes, the menu and so on. Developing the theme does require some knowledge on the PHP programming knowledge, knowledge on Wordpress architecture and HTML/CSS knowledge.

Extending the functionality of Wordpress with Plugins

You are not limited with the features/functionality that comes by default with the ‘core’, you can extend with a lot of plugins. For example, a contact form is the most common thing that exists in every website, if you want the contact form for your website, just install the contact us plugin, configure it with some parameters and place the form in a widget position or in your post or a page and you will have the contact form for your website.

You can always write your own plugin to extend the functionality of Wordpress just like you can create a custom theme. Plugin development is done in Wordpress through the implementation of what are called ‘hooks’ for various scenarios. Developing the plugin for Wordpress require a good knowledge on the Wordpress architecture and the PHP programming language.

Avinash T

Project Manager

Begonia Information Systems