Intro to WordPress Terms

Category: The general topic the post can be classified in. Readers can browse specific categories to see all posts in the category.
Content Page: A content page contains more specific information about a given topic and is optionally nested within a landing page. If a landing page is like a book chapter title, then a content page is like the chapter’s actual content. Unlike a landing page, content pages are visually characterized by an optional image at the top of the page; this image is smaller than the main image used on a landing page. Content pages also have a contextual menu on the left-hand side of the page. The History page under the School of Medicine’s Mission page is an example of a typical content page.
Dashboard: The complete administrative tools for your site, found by hovering over your site name in the upper toolbar and clicking on Dashboard.
External Link: A link that directs you to a page outside of your website. When adding an external link, remember to use https:// in the URL.
External RSS Feed: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. An RSS feed allows automatic syndication of data. The data included in an RSS feed usually includes any content that is regularly updated on blogs such as news headlines or media. “External” simply means that the feed is from an external site.
Home Page: The home page is considered the face of your website – it is the first page people will encounter when they visit your site. For example, when you visit the School of Medicine’s website, the first page you see is the home page. If we think about a website’s organization like a book, the home page is like the book cover and serves as the parent under which your pages are nested.
Internal Link: A link that directs you to another page on your website.
Landing Page: A landing page can be thought of as a page that covers a general topic area. For example, when you visit the Georgetown University Medical Center’s home page, you will see links to the following landing pages: About the Medical Center, Research, Education, Patient Care, News & Events, Giving, HSSI Planning. When users search for a specific portion of your website on Google, they will ideally land on these pages. Visually, landing pages are characterized by a single image along the top of the page and an optional teaser, with any kind of content below. If the home page is like a book cover, think of landing pages like book chapter titles. Landing pages guide you to the rest of the content under that topic. For example, the About the Medical Center page on the GUMC website is a landing page.
Menu: Contains links to your posts, pages, or categories, located just above or below your site’s title. A menu enables readers to navigate around the various parts of your site. You can edit the menu to specify exactly which items appear in the menu.
Page: Pages consist of static, informational content. For example, a Home page or an About page would display informational content that changes infrequently. It is possible to add categories to a page, but not tags. Pages can be organized into pages and subpages, so the relationship between pages is hierarchical.
Parent Page: Parent Pages are a great way to show the relationship between pages. A parent page is a top-level page, with child pages nested under it. For example, the Mission page on the School of Medicine site is the parent page to the following nested pages: Our Mission, History, Cura Personalis, Culture of Respect, and Campus Ministry.
Permalink: A portmanteau of “permanent link”. That means a post URL that does not expose the post ID which could be subject to a change (e.g. when moving to different content management system), but it rather contains a user-friendly post name derived from the post title which could also change, although not recommended, but in a more controllable way. This post name (also referred to as “post slug” or just “slug”) can be edited by clicking the title of your post or page. The permalink is automatically generated based on the title you set to the post and the post’s parent pages, and it shows either immediately above or below the title field when you hover over the title field. Punctuation such as commas, quotes, apostrophes, and invalid URL characters are removed and spaces are substituted with dashes to separate each word. If your title is “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”, it will be cleaned up to create the slug “my-site-heres-lookin-at-you-kid”. You can manually change this, maybe shortening it to “my-site-lookin-at-you-kid”.
Post: Posts consist of web content that is usually date specific and can be featured on pages, such as news articles and announcements. It is possible to add tags and categories to posts which will allow editors to filter through publications and specify which posts appear on pages. Posts are ordered by date, so the relationship between posts is chronological.
Slug: The user friendly and URL valid name of a post. Most common usage of this feature is to create a permalink for each post. WordPress will automatically generate post slugs from a post’s title.
Tag: Refers to micro-categories for your blog, similar to including index entries for a page.
Theme vs. Template: A theme is a complete design for a website. It includes all of the elements that are typically associated with web design such as color schemes, headers, footers, font face and style, margins, and more. A template is a page layout available within the theme. Put simply, a theme is the design of your whole website, while a template is the layout of a single page on your website.
Toolbar: The collection of icons at the top of the editing screen that allow you to perform different actions: access your site’s dashboard, create a new post, review your notifications, and more. You only see the toolbar while you’re signed in to your site.
URL/Web Address: The abbreviation for “uniform resource locator.” This is also known as a web address, or the characters that you see in your web’s address bar. For example, https://georgetown.edu is a URL.
WP Admin: Another name for the WordPress dashboard. To get to the dashboard, add “/wp-admin” or “login” to the end of your site’s URL, like this: example.georgetown.edu/wp-admin