WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

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Thinking Like WordPress

WordPress provides you with the tools to organize your website content, but those tools function in specific ways, just as one type of word processing software has its specific buttons for creating, say, lists. But there's a difference between knowing which button to press to create a list and thinking about ways you can use lists in your documents. That's what this lesson is about: learning to think like WordPress so that you can organize your content in an efficient and flexible manner right from the start, and be able to use it in new and useful ways later.

DYNAMIC VS. STATIC WEBSITES

When you open a website in your browser, you see a single page filled with text and media (graphics, photos, video, and so on), as a page in a magazine or newspaper is a single entity made up of text and images. But what you see in a browser window is created from a series of instructions: the HTML code. So ultimately, the HTML is the single entity behind what you see onscreen: the equivalent of the printed page.

However, there's an important difference between an HTML page and a printed page. The HTML that's fed to your browser may be a single entity when it arrives at the browser, but it may or may not be a single entity sitting on the server waiting for browsers to retrieve it, like a magazine on a newsstand waiting to be purchased. The HTML may be made up of chunks of code that get assembled into a whole in that split second when the browser pulls it off the shelf. ...