Art 114: Interactive Media and Design

Spring 2025 | Harrisburg Area Community College

Instructor: Rich Hauck, MPS

Wordpress

What is WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) currently running on the web, with about 41 percent market share. WordPress achieved this because, unlike competitors like Wix and SquareSpace, it offers the PHP code for free, meaning anyone can download the open source code and choose to host it wherever they want. The company behind WordPress is Automattic, and they run:

  • WordPress.com (the commercial arm which offers hosting and support) and
  • WordPress.org (which hosts documentation, community resources, and the open source software).

Running WordPress Locally

To run WordPress on your own computer, we will use WordPress Studio, which is a software that makes it easy to locally host a PHP/MySQL environment to run WordPress.

Themes and Plugins

Part of the popularity of WordPress comes from the fact that it can extended with themes and plugins.

Themes change the appearance of your WordPress website. Besides the themes themes on WordPress.org, there are several other for-pay sites on the web (for instance, Divi is a theme that allows you to customize with a visual interface in the admin).

Plugins extend the functionality of your WordPress site.