Today, after an insightful briefing from my Mentor, I ventured into the world of WordPress, the platform that has become useful for web development for many. From personal blogs to business websites, WordPress has transformed the way people build and manage their online business.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source Content Management System (CMS), which allows the users to build dynamic websites and blogs. It is the most popular blogging system on the web and allows updating, customizing and managing the website from its back-end CMS and components.
It was initially released on 27th May, 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. It was announced as open source in October 2009.
Key Features of WordPress:
- User Management: It allows managing the user information such as changing the role of the users to (subscriber, contributor, author, editor or administrator), create or delete the user, change the password and user information. The main role of the user manager is Authentication.
- Media Management: It is the tool for managing the media files and folder, in which you can easily upload, organize and manage the media files on your website.
- Theme System: It allows modifying the site view and functionality. It includes images, stylesheet, template files and custom pages.
- Extend with Plugins: Several plugins are available which provides custom functions and features according to the users need.
- Search Engine Optimization: It provides several search engine optimization (SEO) tools which makes on-site SEO simple.
- Multilingual: It allows translating the entire content into the language preferred by the user.
- Importers: It allows importing data in the form of posts. It imports custom files, comments, post pages and tags.
WordPress - Installation
- Download WordPress from https://wordpress.org/download/
- WordPress requires MySQL database. So create a new empty database with user/password.
It's very easy to set up WordPress into your system. The following steps describe how to set up WordPress locally on your system:
Step 1: Extract the downloaded WordPress folder and upload it into your web server or localhost.
Step 2: Open your browser and navigate to your WordPress file path, then you will get the first screen of the WordPress installer as shown in the following screen. In our case, the path is localhost/< Your_WordPress_folder >. Select your language for the WordPress and click on Continue.
Step 3: In this step, you can view the information needed for the database before proceeding with WordPress installation. Click on Let's go!
Step 4: Here, you have to enter the information about the MySQL database. After filling all information, click on Submit button.
Step 5: WordPress checks the database setting and gives you the confirmation screen. Click on Run the install.
Step 6: Enter administrative information. After filling all the information, click on the Install WordPress button.
Step 7: After installation being successful, you will get a screen of the stating success. Click on Log In button.
Step 8: After clicking on login, you will get a WordPress Admin Panel. Enter the username and password which you had mentioned during installation as shown in step 6 and click on the Log In button.
WordPress - Dashboard
The WordPress Dashboard is a first screen which will be seen when you log into the administration area of your blog which will display the overview of the website. It is a collection of gadgets that provide information and provide an overview of what's happening with your blog. You can customize your needs by using some quick links such as writing quick draft, replying to latest comment, etc.
- Dashboard Menu: The WordPress Dashboard provides navigation menu that contains some menu options such as posts, media library, pages, comments, appearance options, plugins, users, tools and settings on the left side.
- Screen Options: The dashboard contains different types of widgets which can be shown or hidden on some screens. It contains check boxes to show or hide screen options and also allows us to customize sections on the admin screen.
- Welcome: It includes the Customize Your Site button which allows customizing your WordPress theme. The center column provides some of the useful links such as creating a blog post, creating a page and view the front end of your website. Last column contains links to widgets, menus, settings related to comments and also a link to the First Steps With WordPress page in the WordPress codex.
- Quick Draft: The Quick Draft is a mini post editor which allows writing, saving and publishing a post from admin dashboard. It includes the title for the draft, some notes about the draft and save it as a Draft.
- WordPressNews: The WordPress News widget displays the latest news such as latest software version, updates, alerts, news regarding the software etc. from the official WordPress blog.
- Activity: The Activity widget includes latest comments on your blog, recent posts and recently published posts. It allows you to approve, disapprove, reply, edit, or delete a comment. It also allows you to move a comment to spam.
- At a Glance: This section gives an overview of your blog's posts, number of published posts and pages, and number of comments. When you click on these links, you will be taken to the respective screen. It displays the current version of running WordPress along with the currently running theme on the site.