From the course: WordPress: Building a Secure Site

Overview of the WordPress structure - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: WordPress: Building a Secure Site

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Overview of the WordPress structure

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- [Instructor] So let's talk a little bit about what WordPress actually is and how it's structured. This is going to help us understand how WordPress sites become vulnerable and subsequently how we can protect them. WordPress is a content management system, which means it's a system for helping manage your content. Other CMS include Drupal, Joomla, and Magneto, as well as things like Squarespace and Wix, which you may have heard of. They all basically do the same thing but in different ways. A WordPress website is made up of a couple of different areas through which your content can be accessed. First you have your WordPress files. Downloading the files that make up WordPress is completely free. It includes the WP content folder where your content goes, WP admin folder, which is where your administrator settings go, and so on. A WordPress website also contains a database. The database stores dynamic data. When you do something on your site, that activity is stored in the database. So the files and the database reference and talk to each other in order to make the site work, and together they create the dashboard, which allows you to make edits to your site without having to directly look at or manipulate the code that makes up the files and the database. This is what makes WordPress so powerful. You don't have to know JavaScript or PHP to edit the JavaScript and PHP which makes changes to the site. The dashboard puts it all in plain terms for you to understand and customize. When you take backups, you have to take backups of the files and the database in order to get a full backup of your website. Both the files and the database live on and can be accessed through your server. Your dashboard can be accessed through the browser with a username and a password. Remember that if a hacker gains access to your server, they can access basically all of the information that makes up your website. But if a hacker gains access to just the dashboard, they'll have more limited access. At the same time, they can still do a lot of damage. So both are worth protecting.

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