Understanding WordPress and Website Design Principles

This assignment provides an in-depth look at WordPress, a popular content management system (CMS), and its features, system requirements, and design principles. It also explores the possibilities of extending WordPress with plugins and themes, making it a valuable resource for students, developers, and professionals interested in web development.

Website Design

Introduction
A website can be divided into pieces a lot of different ways. You can divide up
the process of development into stages, or you can look at the individual
parts. But a website is not like a car. The pieces don’t screw together or came
apart in the same way. What makes a website work is the interaction between
components that are separated in space and, possibly, time. Some of the
pieces are more theoretical, such as the layout and the navigation structure.
It’s like the frame of the car, except that you can’t actually see the frame. Just
the things hanging on it.
Here are some of the components that hold a website together:
 Front End Elements
 The navigation structure
 The page layout
 Logo
 Images
 Contents
 Graphic Design
 Back End elements
 Content Management System
 E-Commerce
 Shopping Cart
 Site Search
 Blog feature
 Image-rotation
 Chatroom
 Contact forms
 Referral forms
 Newsletter registration
 Online databases
 Password protected sections
 Downloadable files
 Multi-media
 Security
Other components

 Hosting. Hosting is where your website is physically located. On a server,
somewhere, are a set of files that are transmitted to user computers when
they call your name.
 Domain Name. This is the address. When someone asks to see your
website, they put this address into the internet, and your site is served up
to them.
 Online Promotion. Not exactly part of the website, but often part of the
design as well as the activity surrounding its launch is the online
promotion. A site with no visitors is like a huge monument built in an
uninhabited desert.
WordPress was initially released on 27th May, 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and
Mike Little. WordPress was announced as open source in October 2009.
Features
 User Management: It allows managing the user information such as changing
the role of the users to (subscriber, contributor, author, editor or
administrator), create or delete the user, change the password and user
information. The main role of the user manager is Authentication.
 Media Management: It is the tool for managing the media files and folder, in
which you can easily upload, organize and manage the media files on your
website.
 Theme System: It allows modifying the site view and functionality. It includes
images, stylesheet, template files and custom pages.
 Extend with Plugins: Several plugins are available which provides custom
functions and features according to the users need.
 Search Engine Optimization: It provides several search engine optimization
(SEO) tools which makes on-site SEO simple.
 Multilingual: It allows translating the entire content into the language
preferred by the user.
 Importers: It allows importing data in the form of posts. It imports custom
files, comments, post pages and tags.
System Requirements for WordPress
 Database: MySQL 5.0+
 Web Server:
o WAMP (Windows)

o LAMP (Linux)
o XAMP (Multi-platform)
o MAMP (Macintosh)
 Operating System: Cross-platform
 Browser Support: IE (Internet Explorer 8+), Firefox, Google chrome, Safari,
Opera
 PHP Compatibility: PHP 5.2+
Developer Features
For developers, we’ve got lots of goodies packed under the hood that you can
use to extend WordPress in whatever direction takes your fancy.
 Plugin System The WordPress APIs make it possible for you to create plugins
to extend WordPress. WordPress’s extensibility lies in the thousands of hooks
at your disposal. Once you’ve created your plugin, we’ve even got a plugin
repository for you to host it on.
 Theme System Create WordPress themes for clients, customers, and for
WordPress users. The WordPress APIprovides the extensibility to create
themes as simple or as complex as you wish. If you want to give your theme
away for free you can give it to users in the Theme Repository
 Application Framework If you want to build an application, WordPress can
help with that too. Under the hood WordPress provides a lot of the features
that your app will need, things like translations, user management, HTTP
requests, databases, URL routing and much, much more.
 Custom Content Types WordPress comes with default content types, but for
more flexibility you can add a few lines of code to create your own custom
post types, taxonomies, and metadata. Take WordPress in whatever direction
you wish.
 The Latest Libraries WordPress comes with the latest script libraries for you
to make use of. These include jQuery, Plupload, Underscore.js and
Backbone.js. We’re always on the lookout for new tools that developers can
use to make a better experience for our users.
Conclusion
WordPress; however, there are literally thousands of plugins that extend what
WordPress does, so the actual functionality is nearly limitless. You are also free
to do whatever you like with the WordPress code, extend it or modify in any

way or use it for commercial projects without any licensing fees. That is the
beauty of free software, free refers not only to price but also the freedom to
have complete control over it.
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