WordPress is a content management system

- In the beginning of this course, I called Wordpress a content management system, or CMS. And I said it's really just an application that works as an interface between a publisher, a database, and a visitor. This is of course a rather simplistic description, and I think I owe you a bit more of an explanation. So far in the course you've learned how to create posts and pages, how to organize them, and how to add media items to them. All these actions are part of content management. You are managing content.

And what makes Wordpress so powerful is precisely that it gives you the ability to manage your content. You've already seen the most obvious example, once you add an image to a post in Wordpress it becomes it's own entity, you can call it into any other post, or page, or gallery at any time. Without having to upload the image again. Content management. You'll also remember that you can add or remove categories and tags on any post at any time and reorganize your content whenever you want.

Again, content management. The reason you want to use a content management system like Wordpress rather than build static pages for each of your pieces of content, is precisely this: in a content management system you can create, edit, reorganize, reassociate, and delete any piece of content at any time without having to worry about making sure other pieces of content are affected. The system will know what to do and help keep everything in order. Add a new post, and Wordpress puts it at the top of the index page.

Change a publishing date, and Wordpress will reorganize the chronological order for your posts. Schedule a post and Wordpress will publish it at the specified future time. In this chapter we'll look at how we can use the many content management features of Wordpress to manipulate and bolt manage existing content.