Happy Birthday WordPress

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It’s hard to believe that WordPress is ten years old today. WordPress originally started life as a simple blogging platform – but has grown to become the worlds most popular open source content management system. In fact over 60 million sites are now powered by WordPress – with around 18% of all newly published sites using it.

Isn’t WordPress for blogging?

Well yes, but from personal blogs through small business websites and even e-commerce stores WordPress has proved itself flexible and capable of powering a wide range of different website types.

So how does WordPress work?

Without delving into PHP and MySql It’s easy to think of WordPress as having 4 parts or layers. The very first layer is a database where WordPress stores all your websites’ text and settings. On top of this sits the core WordPress installation.This handles all the routine jobs like logging in and out, editing text and images, and generally helping you run a tidy website. The next layer we’ll call Plugins. Plugins are used when your website needs to do something that’s not part of the WordPress core, this could be a booking system, a library catalogue or a portfolio. The final layer is the theme. The theme takes all the information provided by the WordPress core and plugins and displays it nicely to your websites users.

Sounds complicated?

Well it’s a lot more complicated than the flat html websites of 10 years ago. But the great thing about constructing websites this way is that they keep the data and the display of that data separate. So if you want to completely change the look of your website then you (usually) only need to change the theme. The websites’ content remains the same; we’re just displaying it differently. And if you need to add some new functionality then is also relatively easy to achieve.

Free plugins and themes.

WordPress boasts a very active plugin and theme development community. There are thousands of freely available plugins and themes for you to download and install on your website. Some plugins and themes are released by individuals in the hope that others might find their work useful. Professional companies often release free versions of their commercial plugins to the community hoping you’ll find it useful enough to upgrade to the paid version. Of course finding your ideal plugin or theme can take a lot of research and testing.

Custom WordPress plugins and themes.

Of course you might not be able to find exactly the right plugin or theme you’re looking for – but this is where custom theme and plugin development comes in. WordPress can be customised and extended to pretty much anything you need from your website.