WordPress - essential articles for WP users and owners

At CollectiveRay, WP or more commonly known as WordPress is our favourite framework when it comes to creating a website. Our various articles bring you the essential articles for you to get the most out of your website by giving extensive, but simplified articles about various topics.

But why WordPress?

Quite a few reasons really.

First - WordPress, is a tried-and-tested solution for building a website. In fact, it is the most popular way to build a website by far. While statistics vary, as at the time of writing, it powers about 27% of websites on the internet - a number which keeps on growing.

This well-established authority over the ways to build a website means that, you, as a WordPress user will never run out of support in any way shape or form. Whether this is in terms of the thriving community, the themes or plugins available (such as the Divi theme), the support in terms of services and tutorials, websites, communities and everything else built around website, the framework is so popular that it has spawned several industries, niches within niches - there is a whole universe around WP.

Second - it's free. Now, by free, we don't mean, you don't have to pay any money to get your website up and running. You're going to have to find a good hosting provider, or host on WordPress.com - which means you're going to have to fork out some money. You'll also highly advised to buy a premium or paid template, and should you need specific functionality, you'd also be very well-served if you paid for a few good plugins.

But, WordPress per se, the code, framework and download is still free and open-source, meaning there is no vendor tie-in or lock-in, which gives you much more freedom than if it all depended on a single vendor.

Having said that, Matt Mullenweg, (he who is unlucky in cards), the founder of WordPress and The WordPress Foundation still has a pretty strong hold on the direction that WP takes, which sometimes comes under fire, for not taking into consideration what the community feels. We will not argue whether this is fair criticism or not, running a behemoth with such a responsibility requires a strong pair of hands, and this will inevitably irritate or irk a few people.

Besides, WordPress, the two major CMSes out there are Joomla and Drupal, both of whom have a fair share of popularity of websites powered by them.

WordPress today is made up of two major components, WordPress.org, which is the actual source of the framework. The 2nd part if WordPress.com - run by Automattic which is essentially a hosting service for WP, which comes with WP fully pre-installed and ready to use, although it has some small limitations, when compared to using a self-hosted version of the downloadable source.

WordPress typically runs on a LAMP stack, Linux Apache MySQL and PHP, and this is the configuration which is used mot commonly. Of course, this is not the only way to deploy WP, there are plenty of other feasible options, but given that the aforementioned components are all open-source, they are the cheapest to use in terms of setting up hosting.

In this section of our website, we will be going through a number of essential items for WordPress. From tutorials to tips, from descriptions of themes to reviews of plugins, from describing hosting companies to how to move your WP installation from one host to another.

As always, our articles are highly-detailed and actionable.