Table of Contents
- What is Web Content Management System CMS?
- System Requirement for WordPress and Installation.
- WP Themes
- Let’s check a few best and most popular themes available in the market.
- WP Plugins
- Conclusion
WordPress is Open Source Web Content Management System ( CMS ). It is free under GPL, In other words, the user has the freedom to use, modify and share. The First WordPress version was released on 27th May 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. It was specially developed as a blog publishing system because users can customize and develop a layout with themes and plugins. That makes it easy to use and flexible to develop all types of websites.
What is Web Content Management System CMS?
Web Content Management System allows users to create and maintain a website without any technical knowledge. CMS help user to manage data such as text, photo, and multimedia. Also, help in editing and publishing website content. In earlier day user need knowledge of HTML, and Databases to make a programme that allows users to store and publish content. That very difficult but CMS make the complete process easy.
CMS like WordPress become more powerful with Themes and Plugins. You can log in to access Dashboard to create Pages, and forms, user management and publish content. It has rich themes and plugin options which help users to try different types of layouts, enhance functionality and create different types of websites like blogs, eCommerce, Learning websites and many more.
System Requirement for WordPress and Installation.
To run WordPress we require following
- PHP version 7.4+
- MySQL version 5.6 OR MariaDB 10.1+
- Web Server
- WAMP ( Windows )
- LAMP ( Linux )
- XAMP ( Multi-Platform )
- MAMP ( macOS )
WP recommends Apache and NGINX most useful servers to run WordPress. We can use any server which supports PHP and MySQL. If you are working with an old environment like PHP5.6 and MySQL5.0, still WordPress can work properly. But this version reached the official End Of Life.
WP Themes
The theme is used for the design and layout of your website. You can develop in such a way that you can create any template for websites like eCommerce, Educational, blogs etc. It fetches content from the database and displays them in the browser. WordPress comes with a few default themes but you can have only one theme active at a time. You can install a new theme and activate it as per our needs.
Now let’s understand a little about the Themes. The theme is a set of files that include template pages written in PHP, images, CSS stylesheet and JavaScript files. Setup store all files in a respective folder and configure them in CMS and make them available to access. Through a dashboard, you can access the theme’s header, footer and many more to modify. There are thousands of paid and free themes available that you can use for a website.
Free themes can download from the official theme directory and can also purchase themes from a third-party developer with advanced features. If you know PHP programming, HTML, JavaScript and CSS then you can create your theme for a website.
Let’s check a few best and most popular themes available in the market.
Divi
Divi is a flagship and most popular theme developed by Elegant theme. It is developed in such a way that it is suitable for all types of websites. Over the period Divi theme was updated and improved. Now they offer a drag-and-drop feature that helps the user to build any type of layout. It also provides hundreds of website templates with customization options. So If you want to create customised WP sites then the Divi builder tool will be the best option for you.
Divi Theme can also use as a regular theme where users can set up header, footer and many more using Divi’s built-in customisation options. Or you can use Divi Theme builder to design the layout as per requirement.
Elegant Theme provides online documentation on their website where you can access all details about features. On the earlier day, they resolve customer issues in a private discussion forum which was not user-friendly and fast. Now they are using the Ticket System via messenger service to resolve the query.
Astra
Brainstorm Force developed the Astra theme in 2017. Astra is one of the advanced and most popular free WordPress themes which is widely used to develop websites like Portfolio, Blogs, Online Shopping and many more. Astra is lightweight not more than 50KB and takes a few seconds to load as they use vanilla JavaScript.
It is a highly customizable theme that allows users to customise containers like blogs, headers, footers, posts etc. It comes with hundreds of importable demo sites that help you to build sites on click. Astro Theme also works with a powerful WooCommerce plugin to build Online Shopping websites and other popular plugins like Elementor and LearnDash. Users can buy the PRO version to extend more features
Ultra
Ultra is also one of the popular themes, created by Themify and they are one of the leading theme providers in the premium market. It is fast and allows customisation using a drag-and-drop builder. The most useful feature of Drag and Drop builder is it builds layout or element responsive so you don’t have to code separately for a mobile website. User can start their website immediately with a pre-made demo site. Another useful feature of the ultra theme is the design of the skin which helps the user to change the look and feel.
Themify also provides add-on features like section scrolling, users can configure vertical or horizontal scrolling. If you are looking to increase user traffic to your website then, you don’t need to worry because the Ultra theme is coded to work well with SEO. So you can use any SEO plugin to rank your website. Ultra theme also comes with all major google fonts and social media icons.
OceanWP
OceanWP is a free WordPress theme which is created by Nicolas in 2016. In a very short period, it became one of the favourite WordPress themes of the WordPress community. OceanWP is lightweight and extendable so its performance is also good. It is responsive, it works great with desktops and with different sizes of screens. If you want to develop an e-commerce website or want to sell your product on the internet then you can use Woocommerce which is a very useful extension. OceanWP also supports drag-and-drop page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, Divi, SiteOrigin, etc.
We are creating a website so we also want to take care of SEO and OceanWP theme developed with SEO in mind. For better ranking, you can use any plugin with it. As we discussed, OceanWP is free, so if you want to extend functionality and performance, you may need some premium extensions. You can buy it in buddle which is the best way to have all the best extensions and other benefits like pro demos. The best thing is unlike premium they also offered free extensions like Modal Window, Post slider etc. which is also useful.
WP Plugins
Now let’s learn about the plugin. Plugins are a set of code written in the PHP programming language. Plugins are used to extend functionality and add new features to websites. It can integrate seamlessly. An authorised user can install/uninstall plugins from the admin dashboard and we can also manually install using the FTP client ( We will learn it in the other post ). All plugins installed are registered in your WP database and you can activate/deactivate, or delete them anytime.
There are thousands of free plugins available on the official website and third-party developers like GitHub. There are also paid premium plugins available in the market and you can buy them from websites like CodeCanyon, PickPlugins
Let’s check a few important and popular Plugins
Contact Form 7: Takayuki Miyoshi
It is free and one of the oldest plugins. Contact Form 7 helps you set up and manage multiple forms. You can configure the form almost on any page and can customise the form field.
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins in the WordPress community. Yoast is available in the free and paid version. In the free version, they offer a basic feature which helps you to manage your SEO and paid version gives full control to manage it.
Akismet Spam Protection: Automattic
ASP is an important plugin to keep your website secure from spam content. It checks your comment against the database to block spam content.
Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed and Growth: Automattic
This is another plugin you must have. This plugin will help you take a backup of every change and can restore it anytime with a single click. It also scans your content for spam, malware and code thread.
Visit the official website for more plugins.
Conclusion
We hope we covered all the points about WordPress and also explained the purpose of themes and plugins in WP development. Theme work on the layout and visual style, Plugins enhance functionality and add a new feature to a website. So if you are planning to start a blog or website on a WordPress platform then it becomes very important to choose the correct theme and plugins.
If you are a developer and planning for theme and plugin development then visit our post to know about WordPress Development Setup. Local development setup helps you in coding and resolving errors before uploading on the live server. In this post, we discussed the most useful software which helps us to set up a local webserver and about top IDE suitable for WP development.
Please check How to Configure Local Website – Linux – Ubuntu
