WordPress tutorials from beginning to advanced levels are available on our website. It is an open-source Content Management System (CMS) designed for blogging. WordPress allows you to easily manage your blog content without knowing any code.
Content development has become a sensational means of sharing information over the internet. Even non-technical users got the ability to publish content easily and quickly on the World Wide Web. A CMS provides a solution to all of these problems thanks to the ease of use of content management tools. In this chapter, you will learn about the concept of CMS and why it is widely accepted by firms, news organizations, educational institutions, and other businesses.
what is a content management system?
A content Management System (CMS) can be defined as a tool or software program containing a set of interrelated programs used for creating and managing different digital or online content. Some famous examples of CMS software are Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, TYPO3, etc. The typical use of CMSes is in two areas:
- Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and
- Web Content Management (WCM)
In the majority of the cases, it can support many users, letting them work in the association. For example, WordPress makes it possible to create many administrative users, where each one has different privileges hence making the work progress in parallel. Content management systems also comprise text as well as the layout and design features like the facility to upload multimedia content like photos, videos, audio, maps, or even any source code.
Components of a content management system
A content management system is composed of two major components. These are:
- A content management application (CMA) is a graphical user interface that allows its users to create, delete, modify, and publish content even without the knowledge of HTML or other programming languages ​​that are necessary to create web pages.
- A content delivery application (CDA) is responsible for the back-end services. It manages as well as delivers content after being framed in the CMA.
Features of the content management system
- User Management: This permits the management of user information like the roles of different users allotted to work simultaneously, such as creating or deleting the user, changing the username, password, and other related information.
- Theme System: This allows us to modify the site view as well as functionality using stylesheets, images, and templates.
- Extending Plugins: Different plugins are offered, which give custom functionalities and features to create the CMS site.
- Search Engine Optimization: It is embedded with a lot of search engine optimization (SEO) tools making content SEO more straightforward.
- Media Management: is used for managing the media files and folder, with uploading media contents easy and effortless.
- Multilingual: Translation of the language, as preferred by the user, is possible through CMS.
ADVANTAGES OF CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
- Most of the CMS is open source and is available for free.
- Easy and quick uploading of media files can be done.
- Several SEO tools make on-site SEO simpler.
- Easy customization is possible as per the need of the user.
- It can modify CSS files as per the design needed by the user.
- Many templates and plugins are available for free. Customization of plugins is also possible.
- Content editing is also more comfortable as it uses the WYSIWYG editor.
Disadvantages of Content Management System
- CMS software needs a time-to-time update, and hence the user needs to look out for an updated version.
- The use of different plugins can make your website heavy and challenging to run.
- CMS hosting is quite expansive.
- PHP knowledge is required to modify or change the WordPress website.
WordPress provides the most amazing way of creating websites and blogs. More than 34% of the websites are built using WordPress. So, it can be said that this popular content management system is famous for developing blogging sites and websites. Today, WordPress has proudly brought the most supportive and useful blogging community on the web. Thousands of sites (news, updates, resources, training, tutorials— the list is endless) exist which inherit and make use of WordPress. In this chapter, you will learn about the primary purpose of WordPress and its types and features.
What is WordPress?
With WordPress, anyone can download, use, modify, and contribute to the software for free. It is an open-source CMS that has been licensed under GPLv2, which means it can be used and modified by anyone. WordPress helps content publishers manage essential portions of websites like website content, and multimedia files in web pages without requiring them to have any previous knowledge of web programming. The final result is that WordPress makes the process of building websites easy for anyone regardless of their skill level.
Features of WordPress
WordPress is considered to be the most popular content management system due to its characteristics.
- The most important features of WordPress are that you can create a dynamic website without any programming and design knowledge.
- WordPress is theme-based, which provides you options for various open-source and premium design themes, which can be integrated easily without any design knowledge.
- Plugins extend the functionality of WordPress, which can be used to add new required modules.
- WordPress sites are search engine optimization (SEO) friendly, and it means sites built-in WordPress can be easily optimized for search engine listings.
- WordPress is Multilingual, which allows users to translate content into their language.
- WordPress has an inbuilt Media Management System, which is used to manage images, music, documents, etc., and can be used with text content.
Advantages of WordPress
- WordPress is a free and open-source platform under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
- Design theme customization in WordPress is straightforward.
- It allows you to manage users with different roles and permissions.
- WordPress media management is quick and easy to use.
- WordPress provides a WYSIWYG editor to manage your text content, which is very useful for manipulating the layout of the document.
WordPress.com and WordPress.org
The two ways through which WordPress allows you to host a site are WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The primary thing which varies between these two approaches is the real host. By making use of WordPress.org, you might download the script free of charge and host it on a local machine or on any server. Byt, in the case of WordPress.com, it takes care of every aspect, right from hosting the site for you to providing features for managing the content. You don’t have to organize a web server or pay for hosting or even download any application, but yes, ads will be shown on your site.
| WordPress.org | WordPress.com |
|---|---|
| It requires a separate web hosting account to run a WordPress site. | Requires you to sign up for an account or create a website or blog |
| It helps in creating a website for free and is an open source for further modification | Get basic website functionalities for free and need to pay to upgrade for professional site development |
| You can upload your plugins to extend the functionality. | No Plugin upload is allowed. |
| Here, you can use your custom URL. | Free plans will be a sub-domain of WordPress. |
Pros and Cons of WordPress.org and WordPress.com
If you are not paying any interest in hosting or managing a web server, then WordPress.com is the way to go. This is because WordPress.com is free, and setup can be done quickly and easily. However, it will charge you to remove the term WordPress which will be included in the URL as well as you will not be competent enough to upload custom themes and plugins without having a prior payment for the services. You also cannot edit or modify the backend PHP code.
WordPress.org is a self-hosted version and provides additional flexibility with control on your site. Your self-bought domain name can be used, themes can be uploaded, and plugins can be incorporated. Hence, this gives flexibility and custom control to your web development.
On May 27, 2003, WordPress got released officially by its founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Before that, the b2/catalog was widely used as a blogging tool that got launched in 2001 by French developer Michel Valdrighi. PHP, along with MySQL, was used for developing the b2. This tool was mainly meant for writing blogs.
B2 used MySQL for managing databases that offer a search option in the middle of the blogs residing in the database. It was licensed under GPL as an open-source tool, but it had an unmaintained site.
How WordPress Came to Origin
WordPress, being the successor and source code extracted from b2/catalog, was founded by Mike Little along with Matt Mullenweg. Matt Mullenweg, who was a son of a software engineer, and a user community member of b2, installed b2 in his system for his personnel use in the year 2002.
As Michel Valdrighi stopped providing updates of b2, Matt was determined to fork the tool b2 and make it more prominent for his blogging. He wrote a blog where he announced to fork the source code of b2, and Mike Little replied affirming that he is will join Matt in forking and work together. Later, they formed a team of developers, and fewer than ten team members succeeded in creating their own version of WordPress on April 1, 2003, and the name of the WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck Tremoulet, a friend of Matt.
Releases of WordPress
It was the very first version of WordPress, i.e. version 0.7, which got released on May 27, 2003. A subsequent version was again released in January 2004, called the Davis version of WordPress. After a few months after the release of WordPress, b2++ was developed by Donncha O Caoimh from Ireland and Francois plague from France. But, due to multiple forking being done on b2, on 29th May 2003, Michel was sure to make WordPress the official division of b2.
Today’s WordPress
WordPress is now the most popular CMS tool and is expanding day by day. New features are getting incorporated in each subsequent version. At present, it is the leading and most widely used self-hosted blogging tool in the world, having more than millions of users using it on a daily basis.
WordPress Licensing
The popular and widely used WordPress has been licensed under GPLv2, which is abbreviated as GNU General Public License (Richard Stallman designed GNU software) makes it free of charge and is also open-source software. The predecessor blogging tool from where WordPress originated, i.e., b2/catalog, was also licensed under GPLv2. Every copy of WordPress contains a license with it. Making WordPress license under GPL allows the freedom to install, modify, and distribute its source code to others, also making it flexible enough to use.
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