Introduction
What is WordPress? If you’ve ever thought of owning a website or trying to work in the field of website design, you’ve certainly heard the name WordPress, and you may have wondered what WordPress is; Beyond that, you may have asked yourself what WordPress is and what it is used for, and even next to the name WordPress, you may have come across other words such as CMS and want to know what WordPress CMS means. In this article, we will comprehensively examine the answers to these questions.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an Open Source content management system, which is the easiest and most popular way to create a website or blog. In fact, over 43% of all websites on the internet are built with WordPress. That means more than one out of every four websites you visit is probably powered by WordPress.
WordPress is designed and produced based on PHP programming language and MySQL database. To use WordPress, you need to install it on a web server such as IIS or Apache. This web server can be on your host or on your internal network server. Depending on whether you want to use WordPress on the Internet or an internal network, its hosting locations will also be different. Of course, it is obvious that programmers and developers can install a copy of it on their personal computer and perform the development and testing procedures on it and then transfer the final version to the main server.
But a Content Management System is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of a website (such as content) without having to know anything about programming. In fact, the WordPress content management system makes it possible for anyone (even non-developers) to build a website.
History of WordPress content management system
wordpress originated as a branch of a project called b2/cafelog and was created and introduced as an independent project in 2003.
A joint effort between Matt Mullenough and Mike Little to create a fork of b2 led to the creation of WordPress. On April 1, 2003, Matt, with the help of his friend Mike Little, created a new b2 branch on SourceForge using the b2/cafelog core system. Another friend of Matt’s, Christian Tremoult, recommended that it be called WordPress, and that was the name that got them involved.
The first version of WordPress, WordPress 1.0, was released in January 2004. This version is known as the Davis version. Mullenough was and still is an admirer of the jazz greats. He named all the updates after jazz greats. In addition, Matt used to include a plugin called Hello Dolly in every version of WordPress. This plugin is a long standing tribute to Louis Armstrong.
Today, Matt Mullenough has pretty much become the face of WordPress. He is also the founder of Automattic, the company behind the for-profit WordPress.com service.
The history of WordPress since its establishment in 2003 has gone through many ups and downs and has made great progress. Thanks to its huge contributors and community, WordPress has become the most popular way to create any type of website.
What is the use of WordPress?
As a content management system, WordPress has a set of basic functions such as page creation, writing, text editor, user management, etc., for which a rich set of plugins are also designed. These capabilities allow the designer to create a practical solution with a detailed knowledge of the structure of WordPress and its plugins and themes.
WordPress can be widely used in the following areas:
1-Developing a classifieds site for business or organizational purposes
2-Create a website to display real estate listings
3-Creating separate landing pages
4-Create a static website
5-Building product review sites
6-Building membership sites
7-Create a database to provide customer support and reduce support requests. A knowledge base helps users find quick answers and resources to their questions.
8-Building an e-commerce site and enabling payment by integrating the site with payment gateways
9-Creation of portfolios and the possibility of creating flexible and dynamic portfolios
10-The possibility of creating a hub of social networks and placing feeds of Twitter, Facebook and other networks on the site
11-Building an LMS and creating an educational site
As you can see, you can create all kinds of sites with WordPress and there are no limits.
Features of WordPress content management system
Some of the basic features of WordPress that have made it so widespread include:
WordPress is free and open source
One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is that it is free and open source software. Although you have to pay a small amount for hosting when you create a website, you don’t need to pay any money to use WordPress software; Beyond that, you can find tons of free open source plugins and templates to change the look and feel of your website.
Highly customizable and very flexible
Even if you are not a developer, you can easily modify your website thanks to the huge ecosystem of WordPress themes and plugins. Themes primarily change how your website looks, but plugins change how your website functions. Plugins can perform a small task like adding a contact form to your website or change the entire functionality of your website; Like creating an e-commerce store. Currently, there are more than 50,000 free WordPress plugins and 5,000 free WordPress themes, as well as many advanced and premium options.
Along with the many plugins and templates that WordPress has, site designers and programmers can create or change different programs and layouts using the flexible WordPress frameworks.
Easy WordPress installation
If you think you need to be a professional to create your own website, you are very wrong. Just click a few buttons and you can install WordPress on your site.
Lower setup and maintenance cost
According to DeviousMedia, the costs related to installation, customization and maintenance of WordPress are lower than other content management systems such as Joomla and Drupal. In addition, it is much easier to find designers and programmers to customize WordPress.
WordPress application for Android and IOS
As a WordPress site owner, you can easily create an Android or IOS application for your site and attract the attention of mobile users of your site. There are various plugins for this, for example, you can use the AppMySite program to create your website or online store application and provide it to users.
Security in WordPress
Due to its popularity, WordPress has attracted the attention of hackers. WordPress has been exposed to security vulnerabilities, but most of the time it’s because users follow the worst security practices.
Using old versions of WordPress, nulled plugins, poor system management, poor management of usernames and passwords, lack of knowledge about the web and security among non-expert WordPress users keep hackers at the top of their cyber game. Even great sites don’t always use best practices. Reuters was hacked for using an old version of WordPress.
Basically, security is not about completely secure systems because it may be impractical or impossible to find and/or maintain such a system. What is called security is related to risk reduction, not risk elimination. That is, applying all the appropriate controls available to you that will allow you to improve your overall situation and reduce the likelihood that you will become the target of an attack and subsequently be hacked. There are a set of guidelines for increasing WordPress security that, if you use them together with a WordPress security plugin, you can greatly prevent your website from being hacked.
Advantages and disadvantages of WordPress
Some of the advantages of WordPress are:
1-Good customization options
2-A search engine friendly system
3-An open source project and free to use.
4-Highly expandable and extensible using a huge collection of plugins
5-Easy to learn WordPress environment that eliminates the need for a web designer for every small change.
6-Better control over the content, as well as the possibility of inserting content and easy data export
7-Fast content uploads and additional support through classified media platforms.
Some disadvantages of WordPress are:
1-Need lots of plugins for extra features
2-Frequent theme and plugin updates that increase the likelihood of crashes and broken links.
3-Slow page load speed due to all the added plugins, oversaturated databases and codebases
4-Poor SEO ranking. The features that WordPress offers by default in its packages are not enough to improve the site’s SEO.
Support in WordPress CMS
WordPress is an open source project with a large community of developers and users that you can raise all your possible problems and questions in the Support Forum section and get help and support from this huge community. The large number of people who use WordPress has the advantage that there are fewer problems that you will encounter that many people have not encountered before.
WordPress theme or theme
WordPress users can install and use different themes. Templates allow the user to change the appearance and functionality of the website without changing the code or content. Every WordPress site needs at least one theme to display. And all templates follow WordPress standards. In WordPress, PHP, HTML and CSS are used to create the template. You can add a new theme to WordPress in two ways. First, install your template directly from the profile section of the WordPress admin dashboard. Or copy the folders related to the template in the templates directory on the WordPress server.
A template can inherit its settings from another template and override certain items. WordPress themes are generally divided into two categories: free themes and commercial themes. There are many free themes listed in the WordPress theme directory. You can buy commercial templates from online stores or directly from their developer. You can also create a completely customized template for yourself. Templates created by WordPress developers are a good option to use as a base for a new theme.
WordPress plugin or extension
The architecture of WordPress plugins allows users to develop the features of the site or blog. Currently, more than 50,000 plugins have been written for WordPress. Each of them provides new features and capabilities for the user to customize his site according to his needs. These features provide a wide range of possibilities such as optimizing the site for search engines, displaying special information for logged in users, new menu, etc. But it should be kept in mind that plugins are not always developed along with new versions of WordPress, and some of their features may be disabled or completely disabled in the new version.
Comparison of WordPress content management system and other CMS
Three of the most famous content management systems in the world
They are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. In this section, we make a comparison between these three content management giants.
A quick look at three popular CMS
WordPress: the best option for people who are not familiar with programming. Because it is very easy to use. WordPress works well for small and medium websites and blogs.
Joomla: The best option for e-commerce websites and social networks. But using it requires technical skills.
Drupal: It’s very hard, but it’s also very powerful. Using it requires proper knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP.
Installing WordPress
Installing WordPress is the first thing you should do after you know what WordPress is and what it does. WordPress is known for its ease of installation. Installing WordPress is, in most cases, a very simple process that takes less than five minutes. Many web hosts provide you with automatic WordPress installation tools that you can use to install WordPress automatically. But if you want to install WordPress yourself, that is also very easy to do. You can also install WordPress on your personal computer (localhost) and on the server.
final word
To answer the question of what WordPress is, you should know that WordPress is a flexible and scalable site builder and content management system that can be used by both site owners and experienced developers. If you want to know what WordPress is and what it does, WordPress has been popular since its early days as a simple blogging platform and is now used to build any type of website.
Versatility, free and open source, wide variety of themes, plugins, huge community, security features and many more are all great features to consider when building a WordPress site. What is WordPress CMS? You should know that WordPress content management system provides a free and easy platform to share information with the world to its users of any type.
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