I’ve found that many people are puzzled by some of the terminology used by nerds like me. In this post I’ll define some of the most common WordPress terminology that I use the most when building your site.
Posts | These are your blog posts. You’ll see the ‘Posts’ option on the left hand side menu in the dashboard of WordPress when you are logged in as an administrator.
Pages | Similar to posts, but not for your blog. These are more for pages such as ‘Home’, ‘About’ & ‘Contact’.
Plugins | These extend the default functionality of WordPress. Usually they are created by 3rd party developers. A plugin I use frequently is the Ninja forms plugin to make really ace forms. But there are hundreds of thousands of plugins available for everything you can possibly imagine.
Menus | This is your site navigation.
Portfolio | These have more ‘sorting’ options than posts. But essentially they are the almost the same thing.
Theme | This is the template that holds your design together keeping your site pages consistent. Sometimes it’s called a ‘Skin’. It’s got details about the fonts, colours, sizes etc.
Dashboard | This is the first screen you see when you log in as an administrator to the backend of your website.
Admin Bar | The admin bar is usually at the top of your screen when you are logged in as an administrator. You can see it from the back & front end of your website. It contains items such as ‘new post’, ‘pending comments’, ‘profile’ & can be extended by plugins.
Backend | This is where you manage your website content. When you log in you are taken to the Dashboard.
Frontend | This is the website that your site visitors see.
Widget | Widgets are little software applications such as facebook feed integration. You can add widgets around your site into places such as the footer & sidebar.
Shortcode | These are little bits of code that allow coding/writing to be sped up.
Permalink/Slug | Permanent link. This is the url for your page/post. The slug is the part of the url that contains the name of the specific page or post. There are best practice methods for this. So, let’s talk.
Akismet | In a nut shell, this is a spam filter plugin.
Slider | Usually on the home page. Image galleries that scroll through images, sometimes with text on each slide.
Parallax | This is when the background moves at a different rate to the scrolling of the website. ooh, that’s confusing.
Responsive | A website that is responsive (all Webtiger sites are) just means that it will sort it’s self out on different devices. It will scale as the device is smaller/bigger. In the olden days us nerds had to create a site for mobile devices & another site for desktops – Tablets weren’t invented yet. Not anymore.
Trackback | These allow notifications to be sent to website authors when someone links to their content. They invite spammers to have a field day by the way, & should be set up correctly.
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