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WordPress – What is WordPress Anyway?

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You know, I could not wrap my head around what wordpress was and why we should use if for several years. I got to this dashboard that you are in now, got totally befuddled, and ran back to Dreamweaver with all of it’s clunky and hair pulling out problems.

WordPress is much easier, far far easier. If you are new to it you just need to understand a few things about how it works as opposed to HTML and standard “hard coded” web pages.

In the olden days, when the internet was young, you wrote a page, put in code to tell the computer how to display it, and uploaded it to a server. Then when a person wanted to see your page, they would google, or enter into yahoo “master of web marketing” and the server would find the page, and transmit it to the visitors browser. The browser would display it, and the task is done.

Now, we have web 2.0, which is a fancy way of saying that things are a lot easier, and based on databases. But what is all that about?

If you’ve seen a spreadsheet, and most of us have, you get the general idea of a database. The computer understands that a cell has data that relates to a column, (which might be “first name” and a row, which might be “person 1?. That would have the value “mark”.

Now, in a real database, that cell has “relational” connections with the piece of data.

Mark, relates to Master of Web Marketing, relates to New York, relates to 6?-0?, etc. So it’s much more complicated. But the computer can do a lot more in search, and in delivering information to the user.

People who search for wordpress, for example are also going to be related to people that need to know what PHP is, and what MySQL is.

Folks, this is when your eyes will start to glaze over, as mine did. But please bear with me. It’s all you need to know to ignore most of the tech in wordpress.

Php is the code that tells the database (which is a Mysql database) what to do. Then there is CSS (cascading style sheets) which tell the browser how to display the information.

It’s like this:

  1. You say “google, find me Master of Web Marketing”
  2. Google finds the server that Master of Web Marketing sits on”
  3. The server returns the php and mysql elements, and in a nanosecond reads the CSS.
  4. All of this happens so fast, and returns a complete web page to your screen.
  5. The php reads the database (mySql) and the CSS says, make the word blue, the background white, get this image, etc.
  6. So it creates the web pages on the fly, so to speak, to order. There exist no hard coded pages to store.
  7. WordPress does this seamlessly, and easily.

So wordpress makes our lives easier, we don’t really need to learn php, or too much CSS, and NO mysql.

We just add our thoughts, or a lesson like this one 🙂 and we hit PUBLISH.