WordPress For Beginners
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS), written in PHP and paired with a MySQL database. Features include plugins, templates, and prebuilt Wordpress themes that can create the entire feel for your site.
WordPress was originally created as a blog-publishing system but has evolved to support other types of web content including more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, membership sites, etc. Wordpress is designed to be easily utilized by business owners, professionals, and everything inbetween.
Pages + Plugins + Docs
As a disclaimer, I want to state that my experience with Wordpress is very limited, and I have much to learn about the different techniques that WP developers might commonly use when developing a site for their client. I recently did a job for a client in Wordpress and wanted to talk about how my experience was and what I’ve learned about being a Wordpress dev.
Plugins- Plugins are an easy way to add different visual and technical features to your web app with little to no effort. Wordpress offers a wide variety of free plugins to experiment with in your projects and they only take a few seconds to download (Note: try not to add too many plugins because this can drastically bog down your apps performance.)
There are plugins for video capability, word animations, menu options, and much more.
The Docs- I spent most of my time looking at the docs when I was having trouble getting something to work properly. From my experience, the docs aren’t too bad and they’re going to be one of the most reliable forms of information when you are stuck on a problem. I initially went to YouTube to find tutorial videos but quickly found out that it’s no a great resource for Wordpress MOST OF THE TIME. Outdated videos, older versions of WP, and my least favorite- design platforms.
Wordpress gives us the option to download different design platforms to more easily build your website via click and drag. Filtering out the bad videos seemed to take more time than just playing around trying to figure it out on my own. Definitely read the docs.
Wordpress Layout- I decided there are two different ways to build your site in Wordpress. Using Pages, or using Posts. The posts tab is primarily used if you’re trying to build a blog site. Pages can be used for building either a single or multi page website. In the case of building a web app, navigate into your pages tab and create containers (divs essentially) that you’ll want to put your content in. Inside the container you can add paragraphs, background videos, or whatever else you might want. You can control what gets rendered to the screen by selecting the visibility button on each container.
Once you get the hang of it it’s pretty simple to use. It’s just hard to navigate to the good resources when you’re stuck on something.
My experience with it
My overall experience with Wordpress was probably a 5/10. While that may seem low, I think Wordpress is a really good tool to understand because of how many websites are actually made with these website builders. I am glad I got the experience of learning to use Wordpress but to be honest, I’ve never been more excited to go back to coding.
The MDN docs, blog posts, and other resources for Javascript and Reacthave spoiled me too much. If you’re looking into Wordpress then I hope this posts helps! This is just my honest opinion.
