WordPress is the most popular platform. Its success is increasing and will continue to grow. And its popularity has grown because of its core, plugins mechanism and themes.
Familiar with the operation of WordPress, it allows us to go further and explore the full potential of its extensibility.
How WordPress Operation and its Extensibility works?
Knowing the platform well is the basic requirement to have it your way. To fully understand the operation of WordPress, it is necessary to analyze its parts to a better understanding of the whole.
Let us first look at three elements:
- Core
- Database
- Administrative panel
An Overview of the WordPress Core
Under no circumstances, the Core should be edited. Those who do not know the platform, already think of limitations. With the intelligent “hooks” mechanism that is divided into Shares (Actions), and filters, you can absolutely do anything without touching the Core WP.
Throughout its history, the Core has been gaining more and more hooks and increasing their ability to make new implementations keeping it intact.
The growth of hooks in the WordPress core
Source: http://adambrown.info/p/wp_hooks
An Overview of the WordPress Database
The default WordPress installation requires only 11 tables in a MySQL database. With the concept of metadata for Users Posts / Pages, Comments, and Terms, you can do a lot without the need for new tables.
New tables are possible to be aggregated and the platform has a class to facilitate communication with the database.
Scheme of the WordPress database
Source: https://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description
An Overview of WordPress Administrative Panel
The WordPress Dashboard is the management interface of the projects based on the WP. Through this panel, users manage their information in a visual and organized way.
The interface is customized for each user. The management of the various elements – Posts, Pages, Comments, Users, Themes, Plugins, and options – are similar for quick and easy learning.
WordPress Dashboard Behind the scenes of the Core communicates with the database to query, insert, edit and delete information managed in the panel.
WordPress gains super powers
Through the trilogy: Core, Plugins, and Themes. This triad is completed and when well used, it brings super powers to the platform.
The platform Core is extensible. And its flexibility allows you to take WordPress to unimagined uses. Its API is exploited increasingly by plugins and themes visually represent the robustness and numerous CMS use capabilities.
WordPress Plugins
The WordPress.org plugins directory currently offers more than 47,000 plugins and counting that as a whole have already reached more than 1 billion downloads. They are significant numbers.
The plugins can be simple or complex. Can be unpretentious, and robust business. Can be free or paid. Can be a single file or hundreds. Can add features or remove some of them.
The full potential of the platform API can be exploited by plugins to add new features to the core or set new behaviors. As well as acting in the database structure for creating new tables or change the schema standard. With new possibilities, Panel interface is molded to the news implemented.
WordPress Themes
As the WordPress Dashboard is seen as the interface used to manage all the information and content. Themes provide various types of interface for users of projects based on WP interact with the project in question.
There are free themes, paid or developed exclusively for a project. There are themes for various purposes such as blogs, portals, SAAS services and everything that your imagination is able to draw.
The extinction of WordPress Themes
With the arrival and use of increasingly frequent REST API opens public interfaces possibilities of WordPress-based projects without the presence of traditional themes.
In this scenario, WordPress is responsible for managing the information and communicate with various interfaces such as mobile applications, robots, wearable elements and all kinds of devices.
We also have traditional WordPress Themes, but being developed with other standard and structure unlike PHP to interact with the data band. And yes with JavaScript, for example, consuming the data via a REST communication.
The trilogy is not a secret
Core, Plugins, and Themes: This is the trilogy that has contributed to the success of the WP. Understand it is necessary for developers and managers who use it on a day-to-day basis.
So today we can see that, because of its increasingly incredible and unimaginable uses, WordPress market share will keep growing in the upcoming years and just because of its popularity, you can see that web hosting providers are offering custom solutions for WordPress Hosting Websites that can offer better load time, extra features, special support and much more.
