With every piece of software or tool, some terms are associated. For example, if you are using Windows, you know what Start Menu means, if you are using Mac, you know what Finder means. The same way there are WordPress terms.
And while it is not essential to know the inner working of WordPress, knowing specific terms helps in the long-term.
So let’s see what different terms mean?
1. Dashboard/Backend/Admin
The page that you access with the URL, www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin is called as an admin. Here you can configure your website, add new themes, plugins, create new pages, add new blog posts etc. Alternatively, some people call this admin as backend or admin dashboard.
2. Posts
Posts are the articles, blog posts, tutorials, in short, the written content on your website. However, since you can embed videos and podcast episodes on the posts, they can be audio-visual content too. But at the database level, the text is saved.
Now, posts again have some terms associated with it. Let’s see what are those.
– Category
Every post has its category. For example, you are writing a food blog. Then you can have categories like continental foods, Chinese foods, Japanese food etc.
Sometimes a post can have more than one category. There can be categories in the category. Simple called as a subcategory.
– Tags
Although users can categorise the posts into different categories, sometimes there are many focus points and topics that one blog post covers.
For example, on your food blog, you may be writing on a healthy Mexican snack for kids. Then the tags would be, let’s say, kids, lunch, Mexican, fit etc.
So with the help of tags, you tell readers different topics associated with the article.
– Featured image
Every post on your WordPress website will have a featured image. The featured image accompanies your blog post. It is usually the graphic representation of your blog post. Many WordPress themes, while showing the list of blog posts, show the featured image along with the title and excerpt of the post.
– Excerpt
An excerpt is a short description of your blog post. Excerpt accompanies your blog title.
– Author
A WordPress website can have multiple people contributing to it. Therefore the author determines who has provided a piece of content. By default, the logged-in user who is the author.
3. Media
Whatever files you upload in your WordPress media library is called media. Media can be an image, a video or a document. You, however, cannot upload all types of files in your library. There are certain restrictions on it.
4. Pages
A page is a static piece of content. Usually, the content on these pages doesn’t change that frequently, and they do have a specific structure. For example, contact page, about page.
Like posts, pages have a set of terms associated with it. These are featured image, author and excerpt. Tags and category don’t apply to the pages. However, there is one more term that is only applicable to the pages. And it is
– Parent
A page can have a parent. For example, page ‘Web Development’ can have a parent page called ‘Services’.
5. Comments
As the name suggests, comments are the opinions, critique, suggestions or something written that people can write on your blog post or even a page.
6. Widgets
There are some content blocks that we often use on the pages or posts or sometimes in a header to a footer. For example, a menu is a widget; a set of social media icons is a widget.
Another term associated with widgets is widget areas
– Widget Area
Your WordPress theme defines certain areas on your website, where you can add the content blocks (widgets). These areas are called widget areas. For example, a footer is a widget area.
7. Shortcode
Usually, non-techies use WordPress. Therefore it provides us with a shortened piece of code which when inserted in our posts or pages or widgets gets converted into a code which then appears as some content.
A shortcode is like an inflatable bag. It is in collapsed form when you type it in your post or page, but then WordPress pumps the air into it, and you see a complete content block on the actual page.
These are some of the essential WordPress terms. There are a lot more terms than the ones mentioned here. However, these are oft-used.
If you want to know some more WordPress terminologies, do let me know in the comments.
