Understanding the common terms

If you are new to the world of blogging (or the "blogosphere," which is a fairly popular expression these days), you may want to familiarize yourself with the following common terms.

Post

Each entry in the blog is called a post. Every post usually has a number of different parts. Of course, the two most obvious parts are title and content. The content is text, images, links, and so on. Posts can even contain multimedia (for example, videos and audio files). Every post also has a publication timestamp, and most also have one or more categories, tags, comments, and so on. It is these posts, or entries, that are displayed in reverse chronological order on the main page of the blog. By default, the latest post is displayed first, in order to give the viewer the latest news on the subject.

Categories and tags

Categories and tags are ways to organize and find posts within a blog and even across blogs. Categories are like topics, whereas tags are more like keywords. For example, for a blog about food and cooking, there might be a category called recipes , but every post in that category would have different tags (for example, soup, baked, vegetarian, dairy-free, and so on).

The purpose and correct usage of tags and categories is one of the more discussed topics among bloggers. Although there are basic guidelines, as the ones presented previously, every blogger develops his or her own approach after a while, and there are no "written in stone" rules.

Comments

Most blogs allow visitors to post comments about the posts. This gives readers the opportunity to interact with the author of the blog, thus making the whole enterprise interactive. Often, the author of the blog will respond to comments by posting additional comments with the single click of a reply button, which makes for a continuous public online conversation or dialog.

Comments are said to be one of the most important assets for a blog. The presence of a big number of comments shows how popular and authoritative the blog is.

Theme

The theme for a blog is the design and layout that you choose. In most blogs, the content (for example, posts) is separate from the visual layout. This means you can change the visual layout of your blog at any time without having to worry about the content being affected. One of the best things about themes is that it takes only seconds to install and start using a new one. Moreover, there are a number of free or low-cost themes available online. However, you need to be careful when working with free themes from uncertain developers. Often, they contain encrypted parts and code that can hurt your site and its presence in Google. Always look for user reviews before choosing a theme.

Plugin

WordPress plugins are relatively small pieces of web software that can be installed on a WordPress site. They extend the native functionality to do almost anything that the technology of today allows. Just as with WordPress itself, the code within plugins is open source, which means that anyone can build a new plugin if they only have the required skillset. Every WordPress website or blog can work with an unlimited number of plugins (although it is not a recommended approach). The most popular functionalities introduced through plugins include spam protection, search engine optimization possibilities, caching, social media integration, interactive contact forms, backups, and more.

Widget

In short, widgets are a simplified version of plugins. Furthermore, they display a direct, visible result on your blog by using small content boxes (depending on the exact widget you're using, this content can be very diverse). The most common usage of widgets is to have them showcased within the sidebars on your site. Typically, your current theme will provide you with a number of widget areas where you can display widgets (as mentioned, many of these are located in the sidebar). Some of the common usages for widgets are to display content such as categories and tags, recent posts, popular posts, recent comments, links to archived posts, pages, links, search fields, or standard non-formatted text.

Menus

We need to talk some history to explain what the meaning of menus in WordPress is. Back in the day, WordPress didn't allow much customization in terms of tweaking navigation menus and hand-picking the links we wanted to display. This all changed in Version 3.0, when the new Custom Menus feature was introduced. In plain English, what it does is allow us to create completely custom menus (featuring any links of our choice) and then display them in specific areas on our sites (supported by the current theme). To be honest, this feature, even though it sounds basic, is one of the main ones that has turned WordPress into a fully-fledged web publishing platform and not just a blogging tool. I promise this will all sound much clearer in the upcoming chapters.

RSS

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication, and Chapter 8, Feeds, Podcasting, and Offline Blogging, addresses the topic of feeds in detail. For now, understand that RSS and feeds are a way to syndicate the content of your blog, so that people can subscribe to it. This means people do not actually have to visit your blog regularly to see what you've added. Instead, they can subscribe and have new content delivered to them via e-mail or through a feed reader such as Feedly.

Page

It's important to understand the difference between a page and a post. Unlike posts, pages do not depend on having timestamps and are not displayed in chronological order. They also do not have categories or tags. A page is a piece of content with only a title and content (an example would be About Me or Contact Us —the two most popular pages on almost any blog). It is likely that the number of pages on your blog remains relatively static, whereas new posts can be added every day or so.

Users

As mentioned in one of the paragraphs above, WordPress is now a complete web publishing platform. One of its characteristics is that it is capable of working with multiple user accounts, not just a single account belonging to the owner (main author) of the site. There are different types of user accounts available, and they all have different credentials and access rights. WordPress is clearly trying to resemble a traditional-world publishing house where there are authors, editors, and other contributors all working together. Even though the possibility to create an unlimited number of user accounts won't be that impressive for anyone planning to manage a site on his or her own, it can surely be a more than essential feature for big, magazine-like websites.