WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, 3rd Edition

Lesson 1Thinking Like WordPress

WordPress provides you with the tools to create, organize, and update your website content. 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 to use lists in your documents. That's what this lesson is about: learning to think like WordPress so that you can build or rebuild your website in an efficient and flexible manner from the start, and to use it in new and useful ways.

The driving principle behind this way of thinking is: Store everything in the smallest possible piece; then assemble as needed. It's the way of the digital world—photographs assembled out of pixels, data stored in database fields, or video recorded in bytes. WordPress operates with this kind of thinking, and you can make better use of its power if you think of your website and its content in this way.

Static Versus Dynamic Web Pages

If you right-click while viewing a page in your web browser, you'll see a tool called View Source, which displays the HTML of the page you're currently viewing. If you try this tool, it appears as though you're viewing a single file, but for most websites today, that's an illusion. In most cases there is no corresponding file sitting on a web server. Instead, the server has combined dozens and dozens of files in a split second to create what you're seeing with ...