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