WP Tips MSQL Data base in plain English

Hello to you all,

I have just joined this forum and I see that there are many WP questions on here so I thought I would post some fundamental WP tips and lessons to help those who are new to Wordpress

I build WP site for clients and am a bit of a WP Geek so to say, so this little tutorial is called

MYSQL Data Bases in Plain English



Today, I will be explaining what a MySQL Database is and why you need to know about them

Some of you will already know about these things, some of you may have heard of them and some of you will probably have no idea they even exist, so I will now explain what they are and what they are used for, to do this I am going to use an analogy, lets call it this

Build a tax office in your local area

Lets say for example, that it has been decided to build a tax office for the local area to deal with tax issues, for more efficiently at a local level

So what would be needed first?, well they would need to acquire a piece of land to build it on.

IN WEB LANGUAGE THIS WOULD BE - YOUR DOMAIN NAME OR URL

URL = Unique Reference Location, the address of your site

Next they would need to build the structure of the building on the land that has been acquired

IN WEB LANGUAGE THIS IS THE HTML, WHICH WHAT THE STRUCTURE OF WEBSITES ARE BUILT WITH

HTML = Hyper Text Mark-up Language

Once the structure has been built they would need to decorate it to make it look nice

IN WEB LANGUAGE THIS IS THE CSS STYLE SHEET - YOUR THEME IS BUILT WITH THIS

CSS = Cascading Style Sheet

The next step would be to employ people and put in computers and machines so all the tasks could be carried out correctly

IN WEB LANGUAGE THIS IS CALLED PHP WHICH IS CODE THAT CARRYS OUT TASKS ON YOUR SITE

PHP =PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

They would also need a management system

IN WEB LANGUAGE - WORD PRESS IS YOUR CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

So now all is in one place, but wait there is something important missing, how do they access all the data, they need to carry out tax checks and queries, what about all those tax records, where are they kept, the tax office would need to be given access to all the tax records

SO IN WEB LANGUAGE THIS IS THE My SQL Data base, this data base holds all the records and information about your website and just like the tax office, it can not function without it

An example of this, is when someone leaves a comment on your site, they submit their name and e mail address, this information is held in the data base so when they return they are recognised by the database, as in here at WA, all out information is kept on a web data base

If your data base becomes broken your website will stop working and you will see this instead of your web page - DATA BASE ERROR

If you move your site then your data base has to come with it also, when you put a Wordpress site together a data base is created for you automatically

Just remember you are building a digital asset that might one day be worth a tidy sum, if your data base gets damaged your site will be worthless, so its worth realizing how important they are

I hope this has explained data bases for you

Wishing you all every success

Barry