Understanding WordPress

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.