Introduction
WordPress is a powerful open source CMS (Content Management System) implemented from PHP and uses MySQL as a database. In today’s web development world, it has gained popularity and acceptance as a global leader in the web content market. While WordPress has a complete built-in blog feature set that makes it the most popular blog platform on the web, it is equally fully-featured in enabling enterprise business websites. WordPress was founded about a decade ago, and quickly spread to be used for 10 million websites across the internet. Fast forward 10 years to today, WordPress is revered as a global standard in CMS platforms and stands as the core technology for more than 60 million websites.
In this article we hope to introduce some of WordPress’s features.
Administration
The administration area of WordPress is easy to access using the standard login page. Just visit yourdomain.com/wp-admin and you will quickly be looking at WordPress’s admin dashboard. The admin dashboard is organized in for sections: the admin bar, navigation toolbar, the work area, and the footer. These panels give a clear overview of all the features and tools you have to work with in your WordPress website.
You can get started with WordPress in several ways. Personal websites are often created using one-click Get Started solutions offered by many hosting companies. Custom business and enterprise content sites are often set up and created by a team of web developers. Getting started with WordPress is only half the journey though. Once you have a new website, you will need to utilize the dashboard to maintain your site. You can supervise the post comments pouring in from your popular blog posts right in the administration area. The admin dashboard will always make it easy to oversee your site’s recent activity by showing notifications for new articles, comments, plugins, and updates. You can customize your dashboard by dragging and dropping the menu items, set the number of columns, and disable dashboard items altogether. WordPress keeps it simple for you to supervise your new content website.
Simplicity
Simple interfaces, clean design, and straightforward features allow you to get online and get publishing quickly. WordPress was built for easy content uploading. Manage images, your site settings, and users in your team or organization through consistent user interfaces.
Publish With Ease
WordPress allows users to create Posts and Pages, format them and choose custom templates, add media, and publish your content live with the click of a button.
User Management
Administrators for your site have complete access to all content and management interfaces. Administrators have access to all sections of the site and have complete privileges in publishing content for your site, as well as editing your site’s structure, theme, and templates. Authors and Contributors can create content, and manage which content is published. Editors are a user group that may edit existing content, but cannot choose to publish that content. End-users for your site may also create a profile and subscribe to the content they have read. No matter which angle you are viewing the WordPress site, or which role you play in running it, WordPress clearly defines the privelages and access each user gets, and has extensible options for customizing those roles – and even allows for new ones to be created.
Extensible, Easy Theme System
WordPress comes with two standardized default themes, but they may not suit your needs. There is a public theme directory, where thousands of themes are available by theme authors (expert gurus hunched over in offices just like this one, color swatch in one hand and a CSS 3.0 reference book in the other) from hundreds of different industries. If your fancy isn’t won over by an existing free or purchasable theme, you can develop your own theme using WordPress’s theming documentation and guidelines. Once your theme is created, you can upload and apply your theme with the click of a button.
Extend With Plugins
WordPress comes packed full of features to enhance user experience – and for every feature that doesn’t come packaged in the vanilla flavor of WordPress, there is a plugin directory with thousands of plugins. Add complex galleries, rotating header banners, social networking, forums, social media widgets, spam protection, calendars, fine-tune controls for search engine optimization, and custom forms. And this list barely scratches the surface. And if you have some niche custom functionality to integrate your site with custom data and features, there is a ton of information and documentation available to get started on writing your own plugin.
Multilingual Support
More than 70 languages are supported by WordPress. Whether supporting another language is required by your business or by your end-users, the system is built to handle it. Create your WordPress in any language, and manage different versions of articles and posts in various other languages.
