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WordPress is a content management system: an application that simplifies the process of managing, styling, and publishing content on the web. WordPress isn’t a monolithic application; it’s made of many different interacting parts. WordPress itself is written in a programming language called PHP. PHP scripts, combined with the traditional languages of the web platform — HTML, JavaScript, and CSS — are combined to create the application that we know as WordPress.
The WordPress application is essentially useless on its own. It depends on a multitude of other components to do its job. The most important of these is a PHP interpreter to run the PHP code and generate web pages that a web browser understands. WordPress also requires a web server like Apache to answer requests from the web browser, a database to store information like user details and the site’s content, and other components like an image manipulation library.
All of these components run on an operating system: usually Linux in this case. An operating system is an enormously complex software machine made of many moving parts. The operating system runs on a server, essentially a powerful version of the computers you’re familiar with.
To connect to the internet, the server has a network interface that connects it to a network, which is then connected to the internet via one or more bandwidth providers.
If all of this sounds complex, that’s because it is. For the most part, WordPress users don’t have to worry about any of it. The job of a web hosting company is to take care of these details — all you have to do is deploy WordPress on a web hosting account and manage it via its built-in interface.
The WordPress application is essentially useless on its own. It depends on a multitude of other components to do its job. The most important of these is a PHP interpreter to run the PHP code and generate web pages that a web browser understands. WordPress also requires a web server like Apache to answer requests from the web browser, a database to store information like user details and the site’s content, and other components like an image manipulation library.
All of these components run on an operating system: usually Linux in this case. An operating system is an enormously complex software machine made of many moving parts. The operating system runs on a server, essentially a powerful version of the computers you’re familiar with.
To connect to the internet, the server has a network interface that connects it to a network, which is then connected to the internet via one or more bandwidth providers.
If all of this sounds complex, that’s because it is. For the most part, WordPress users don’t have to worry about any of it. The job of a web hosting company is to take care of these details — all you have to do is deploy WordPress on a web hosting account and manage it via its built-in interface.
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