WordPress is what many would call a mid-level Content Management System (CMS). It offers some of the complex features of high end CMSes, but has some limitations and stays relatively easy to use. In most circumstances, you won’t need a special administrator to setup and run WordPress, like you would need with some CMSes. Best of all, it is free, even for commercial usage. But do note, that that is only the cost of the software. You will still, most likely, have to pay for hosting, your domain name, and Internet connection fees.
WordPress is a web application. That means that clicking on a file on your local machine will not display a page in your site. Instead, WordPress needs a web server running PHP and MySQL to enable its use.
It originally started out as a blogging software, however it is used for much more than just blogging nowadays and is a full featured Content Management System, which is expandable via the use of plugins and themes.
One of the most attractive features of WordPress is that it is free to download and install on your server. As such, it is estimated that between 25% and 30% of all websites are using WordPress. It’s not just your personal sites that run it. You can look at WordPress’s Showcase of large sites which use WordPress as well.
WordPress allows you a lot of control at the site level, such as being able to mark pages as private so only registered users can access the page. It also allows for different levels of user controls for the site. However, all access is site wide. You cannot, out of the box, restrict access to different parts of the site based solely upon the user.
WordPress also allows you to work on many sections of the design of the website, from within the admin center. You can create menus, place widgets, etc, without needing to know how to code in PHP, or edit HTML or CSS.
You will often hear people talk about WordPress “out of the box”. This is because one of WordPress’s most used features is it’s extensive plugin ecosystem. WordPress has made it easy for third party developers to create extensions to WordPress in the form of plugins. There are over 29,000 plugins available for WordPress, which allow it to do almost anything you can imagine.
These plugins allow you to change the way WordPress works adding additional functionality.
Why not put that functionality straight into WordPress? Well there are a couple of reasons. First, it may be difficult to include all of those changes inside the main WordPress project. The application would become huge, and unmanageable. Secondly, not everyone needs all of those features. By keeping the core WordPress small, it makes it easier to maintain and use. Then you, the web master, can choose which additional features you want to add.
While many of the plugins are free, others are considered premium. Premium plugins have a fee associated with them. You pay the author for their work. This fee may be a one time fee, or a reoccurring fee. The fee may be from a few dollars, to hundreds of dollars – all depending upon the complexity and the author’s decision on what to charge.
WordPress also allows for developers to create themes. Themes are used to display your webpage to the end viewer.
Themes are relatively easy to create, if you know PHP and CSS. Therefore there are thousands of them available by hundreds of different authors. Most themes are free, although there are some premium themes that have a fee associated with them.
A premium theme may range in price from a few dollars to several thousands dollars. It depends upon if you have a custom theme built just for you, or you are buying a ready made theme from a marketplace. Most premium themes you find in a marketplace are around $100.
What is WordPress? was originally found on Access 2 Learn
