From the course: WordPress: Action and Filter Hooks

What is WordPress? - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: WordPress: Action and Filter Hooks

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What is WordPress?

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- [Instructor] WordPress is open source software primarily built on PHP and MySQL and is a fully-featured content management system. At the time of this recording, W3Techs estimates that WordPress powers over 36% of websites. That's a huge number so it's no wonder that increasing numbers of developers want to understand how to work with WordPress. WordPress comes in two basic flavors, hosted and self-hosted. The hosted version is called WordPress.com and caters to bloggers and businesses who want to get a site online quickly and don't need custom development or access to code. The self-hosted version is available for free download at WordPress.org and offers complete control over the design, database, and code. As self-hosted would imply, this does require that you use a web host of some variety. For this course, I'm using a locally-installed version of WordPress, which means that I'm running both PHP and MySQL locally. The first is via themes. At its most basic, themes are the visual layer that sit on top of WordPress. They control the way we display data and give users varying degrees of control over site customizations. There's full documentation on the WordPress.org website for creating and working with themes. So that's one way. The other most common way to interact with WordPress is via plugins. Whereas themes let us control the design and user interface of a WordPress site, plugins let us layer on additional functionality to WordPress without editing WordPress core itself. It's this capability, along with some powerful APIs, that makes WordPress endlessly extensible. WordPress provides some pretty user-friendly documentation for how to create and work with plugins. As we go on, we'll dig into various aspects of the Plugin Handbook here, as well as some other resources and talk about how to put this knowledge into action.

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