Difference between revisions of "What is WordPress"

Latest revision as of 20:37, 19 February 2017

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS), which is developed on the PHP programming language. Like other CMS applications, WordPress is developed to allow the ability to easily create websites for those that do not know any programming languages to build a website. WordPress is also used by those that DO know programming languages, since it can allow them to easily create a website in a short amount of time.

Who can use WordPress?

Anyone can use WordPress as it is completely 100% free. Yes, that is correct.. it is indeed free to use as it's an open source software. There are hundreds of people around the world that work on this open source software (WordPress), so it continuously is coming out with updates that provide new features and secure the existing features with updated code to prevent attackers from hacking the site.

We see a very wide variety of people use WordPress.. from basic blog sites, e-commerce sites, all the way up to fortune 500 web sites.. and they all pay $0 to host their WordPress site (Unless they purchase a third-party theme/plugin from a developer).

Plugins & Themes

WordPress at it's core is great as it allows creation of pages, blogs, etc., however some people / companies may want to add some additional functionalities and / or design to the WordPress site. This is where plugins and themes come in.

• A Plugin is adding a functionality to your website like a widget. It allows for you to extend and expand the already existing functionality of your WordPress site.
  • See how to install plugins at the following URL: https://wiki.hostek.com/How_to_add_WordPress_plugins

• A Theme is adding the design and look of your WordPress site. It controls the CSS (Styles) and layout of the entire WordPress based website.
  • See how to install themes at the following URL: https://wiki.hostek.com/How_to_add_WordPress_themes

Preventing WordPress from becoming compromised

To prevent WordPress from becoming compromised you'll need to login and update WordPress & it's plugins / themes to the very latest version each week. Updates come out very frequently and they provide strong security vulnerability fixes as well as performance fixes so it's very vital that you always update the core version and the plugins / themes to the latest version at all times.

You can see our wiki article on upgrading WordPress at the following URL: https://wiki.hostek.com/How_to_update_WordPress

Additionally you may want to look into adding a security plugin to your WordPress application, which we would consider adding WordFence. There are a lot of security plugins out there though that you can choose from. To see how to install a plugin see the wiki article on installing a plugin.

WordPress.com Vs WordPress.org

The difference between the wordpress.com and wordpress.org is who is hosting your WordPress website..

• With Wordpress.org it provides the actual files for you to download that YOU can host on your own website that you have hosting setup for. We here at hostek.com host thousands of WordPress sites each day both on our shared web servers and our dedicated VPS servers.

• With WordPress.com it provides actual hosting solutions directly with WordPress that you can utilize. However a great majority of WordPress based sites are hosted with an actual web hosting company (Such as us at Hostek as it allows the user to add custom themes / plugins, as well as you'll be ad free which the basic WordPress packages do not allow.