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WordPress Basic Terminologies πŸ“ƒ

This article will help beginners to get conformable with the terms used within the WordPress ecosystem.

Some of these terminologies might seem known to you depending on your level of experience with WordPress, and web development in general.

These terms will help you to better understand the WordPress official documentation, support articles, and other WordPress developers. Now, here are some terms which you will find handy when talking about WordPress .

  1. Back End β€“ The back end refers to the area of your site where you can log in and manage everything from your Dashboard.
  2. Content Management System β€“ A software which helps to manage content a website.
  3. cPanel β€“ A web-based administration tool for managing your web hosting account.
  4. Database β€“ A software used to store and manage data in an orderly fashion.( i.e. MSQL )
  5. Codex β€“ The official WordPress manual with support articles, documentation, code snippets, and links to external resources.
  6. Default theme β€“ The theme that comes by default with a fresh installation of WordPress. Also used as a fallback theme if the current theme breaks.
  7. DNS β€“ Refers to the Domain Name System which maps domain names( like google.com) to its IP address.
  8. Domain name β€“ A system used to assign easy to remember names to IP addresses of websites.
  9. DOM β€“ An interface that allows programmers to dynamically access HTML and XML on a web page.
  10. Footer area β€“ The horizontal area at the bottom of the website where widgets and copyright information are usually displayed.
  11. Header Image β€“ A wide picture that can be set to appear at the top of your website.
  12. Front end β€“ The user-facing part of your website where visitors can view and interact with your content.
  13. Gravatar β€“ A service which lets users associate a global avatar (image or photo) with their email addresses.
  14. Hosting provider β€“ A company which sells space on a web hosting server for a fee.
  15. IDE β€“ An application which provides you with all the tools you need to develop and test software.
  16. Menu β€“ A collection of links to pages, categories, and social media profiles on your website usually displayed in the navigation area.
  17. Meta β€“ Can mean different things in WordPress depending on where it is used. Usually used to refer to administrative data.
  18. Navigation β€“ A set of links on your website which helps site visitors navigate through your content.
  19. Nonce β€“ A one-time token generated by WordPress to protect your site against unexpected or duplicate requests which can cause permanent or unintended consequences.
  20. Multisite β€“ Create a network of WordPress sites from a single WordPress installation.
  21. Permalink β€“ A permanent link to content on your website. Can be used to share unique pages on your website with others easily.
  22. Sidebar β€“ A place on your website where you usually display the search bar, recent and popular posts, and other important widgets. A website can have more than one sidebar.
  23. XML-RPC β€“ A remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.
  24. Toolbar β€“ The small black bar just above your site from where you can access quick links to various parts of your website. Usually visible only to logged in users.
  25. Post – Also known as β€œarticles” and sometimes incorrectly referred to as β€œblogs”. In WordPress, β€œposts” are articles that you write to populate your blog.
  26. Post Slug – A few lowercase words separated by dashes, describing a post and usually derived from the post title to create a user-friendly (that is, readable and without confusing characters) permalink. Post slug substitutes the β€œ%posttitle%” placeholder in a custom permalink structure. Post slug should not be changed and is especially useful if the post title tends to be long or changes frequently.
  27. Post Type – Post type refers to the various structured data that is maintained in the WordPress posts table. Native (or built-in) registered post types are postpageattachmentrevision, and nav-menu-item. Custom post types are also supported in WordPress and can be defined with register_post_type(). Custom post types allow users to easily create and manage such things as portfolios, projects, video libraries, podcasts, quotes, chats, and whatever a user or developer can imagine.
    1. Related articles: Post Types
  28. Role – A role gives users permission to perform a group of tasks. When a user logs in and is authenticated, the user’s role determines which capabilities the user has, and each capability is permission to perform one or more types of task. All users with the same role normally have the same capabilities. For example, users who have the Author role usually have permission to edit their own posts, but not permission to edit other users’ posts. WordPress comes with six roles and over fifty capabilities in its role-based access system. Plugins can modify the system.
    1. Related article: Roles and Capabilities
    2. External link: Role-based access control (Wikipedia)
  29. Screen – In WordPress a screen is a web page used for managing part of a weblog (site) or network. The term β€˜screen’ is used to avoid confusion with β€˜pageβ€˜, which has a specific and different meaning in WordPress. For example, the web page used to manage posts is known as the Posts Screen.
    1. Related article: Class_Reference/WP_Screen
  30. Shortcode – A Shortcode is a technique for embedding a snippet of PHP code into the body of a page or other content item.

To learn more about WordPress terminology, have a look at the WordPress Glossary page.

WordPress Terms

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By Muhammad Faizan Haidar

A self motivated WordPress developer. I have years of experience in WordPress plugins development.

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