Introduction to WordPress
Overview and Content Management basics
Presented by:
Peter Hebert
Rex Rana Design and Development Ltd.
What is WordPress?
- World's #1 content management system (CMS)
- powers about 29% of the web
- 60% of sites using a CMS
- Started as simple blogging tool in 2003
- Tool to make managing website content easier for non-technical publishers
What is a CMS?
A Content Management System, or CMS, is a web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to add, edit and manage a website.
- Stores your website content
(text, graphics, photos, video, audio, documents, etc.) - Presents that content to site visitors in a flexible manner
- Manages the organization or structure of content
(page hierarchy, menus, etc.) - Separates website into 3 distinct areas/concerns:
Content, Presentation, Logic
Why WordPress?
- Open Source - code is free to use and redistribute
- Easy-to-use
- Extremely flexible
- functionality can be extended with plugins
- change your site's design easily with themes
- Millions of users worldwide - easy to find help
WordPress requirements
You need a web host or local environment that has:
- A web server (ie. Apache, nginx, IIS)
- PHP - the language WordPress is written with
- Database (MySQL or MariaDB) - used to store content/configuration
Requirements (wordpress.org)
Key Concepts
- Post Types
- Taxonomy
- Menus
- Users
- Plugins
- Themes
Post Types
-
Used to organize types of content
- by structure and capabilities
- Built-in post types:
- Main Post Types: Post, Page
- Others: Attachment, Revision, Nav Menu
- Custom post types:
- usually defined by plugins
- Examples: event, course, report, etc.
Post Type: Post
- Used for content that is published at regular intervals
- i.e. blog or news
- Posts have dynamically generated archives, by:
- Date: year, month, day
- Author
- Category
- Tag
Post Type: Page
- for content that isn't time based or is relatively static
- Examples: About Us, Contact
- no archives
- can be nested / hierarchical
- themes can define custom Page templates
Taxonomy
Taxonomies provide a way of classifying your content.
- built-in taxonomies:
- Categories - use for broad categorization, can be hierarchical
- Tags - loose keyword style categorization
- Post Formats - can be used by some themes to apply different styling to posts
- Plugins can also define custom taxonomies
Menus
Menus are lists of navigation links for your site
- Can contain links to Pages, Posts, Taxonomy and custom URLs
- Themes define locations where menus can be placed
Users
Users registered accounts on your website
- Best practise => one User per person (don't share logins)
- Users have Roles that define permissions for what they can do on your site
- Administrator: full access to all admin features
- Editor: can publish and manage posts of all users
- Author: can publish and manage only their own posts
- Contributor: can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them
- Subscriber: can only manage their user profile.
Tour of WordPress admin
- Dashboard
- Posts
- Media
- Pages
- Appearance
- Users
- Settings
Thank You
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Peter Hebert peterhebert.com
Rex Rana