 Alright, can I get a quick show of hands? There's bright lights, so I can't really see you, but Quick show hands how many people here can speak another language Spanish French German that that's awesome. That's there's a lot of hands Now, what if I say hola como estas? Did uh, did you understand what I said? Bien now how about bonjour parles vous français Ah, we now you might not be fluent in that language In fact, you might not even claim to understand it, but you know some simple words some basic phrases in that language Now the goal of this talk is to help you to explain Or to help explain basic terms that are used by developers so that you can better explain yourself when you're talking to developers But also more importantly so that you understand what they're saying to you Now to do this before we dive headfirst into Terminology and technologies. We're gonna briefly discuss the fundamentals The foundational concepts of how the web works See the way that you see a website is a bit different from how a developer views a website You see something like this You recognize that a website is made up of multiple elements on a page There's text. There's images. There's links You know that some of the elements are on every page and some elements change depending on the page You know that some elements are dynamic. You have things like sliders or gallery views Now a developer understands all of this as well, but they look a little bit deeper when they see a site This is how a developer sees a site see they're looking through it They don't just look at the content, but they look at how the content changes Where it's stored on the server how it's being delivered to the web browser all the different steps in between and When a developer is pulling a site apart they usually divide the site Into two parts two pieces of the front end and the back end now These are confusing terms because they tend to be a bit overloaded See when you hear front end and back end you might be thinking about this How the front end is the part of your site that your users see and the back end is the part of the site The WordPress admin that that you see that you have access to to control the content and make changes That's not usually what a developer is talking about See from a developer's perspective all of that Counts as the front end of the website the back end is the realm of the server It's the hardware and the software that's used to build and serve both the user-facing side and The admin the WordPress admin side of your website and then deliver it to your browser The specifics of what falls on what side of the line can be a bit fuzzy But this is the division we're going to be using through the rest of the talk So let's get started with the front end Starting with html html is the file format of the web html stands for hypertext markup language and it all comes back to html no matter what you use to build your site Whether you use WordPress or Drupal or Squarespace or something else it all ends up is html Another term getting ahead of myself there another term that Is often using conjunction with html css CSS stands for cascading style sheets and it's what determines how a page looks Layout color typography all of that is controlled in css And we have javascript which is commonly abbreviated js JavaScript is a programming language that lets you make changes to an html page dynamically That's really all that javascript does it makes changes to the html page that it's connected to A common place that you'll see javascript is in things like sliders or carousels Another one would be drop-down navigation flyout navigation different interactive elements like that Then we have wordpress themes now you've probably heard wordpress themes Described as being the way that you control or change the look and feel of your site That's absolutely true But now that you know about html css and javascript You can understand that the way wordpress themes work is by bundling those things together in an easy to install way But there's a critical fourth piece to wordpress themes Something called php and we'll talk about it a bit more later. I promise but for now Let's just say that php is something you add to the html of your page so that you can pull in content from wordpress And Since remember we're talking about both the user facing side and the wordpress Admin side when we say the front end of your site It makes sense to take a moment to talk about plugins here, too But admittedly this is where the line starts to blur a little bit because wordpress plugins add features and functionality to your site And to do this they tap into things that fall under the back end part of your site The written in php they connect to your database. They install files on your server So let's just move ahead and start talking about the back end of your site And when we're talking about the back end of a website You have to start with servers This is another term with some problems because the word server can be applied to two very different things Server could be used to describe the hardware That's running your site Something that kind of looks like this. It's got blinking lights now When we're talking about server hardware, we have to stop take a moment and talk about hosting Hosting can also be confusing as a term hosting refers to the service plan You have for the hardware that your website lives on You can kind of think about hosting like running a place to live your host is where your site lives And just like there's different kinds of places to live. There's different kinds of hosts One of the cheapest and most common types of hosting is something called shared hosting You can sort of envision it working like this You have multiple sites all running on the same physical hardware If we were to continue with the analogy of renting a place to live Then you could think of shared hosting as kind of like renting a spot in the hostel Now another common type of Hosting is something called a vps vps stands for virtual private server This works differently than a shared host With a vps each customer gets their own dedicated server to run their site If we were again continuing the analogy of a place to live hosting on a vps is kind of like renting an apartment in an apartment building Got a little bit more structure and separation from your neighbors Now you might be wondering what the deal is with the dotted line that's running around the those vps's there It kind of looks suspiciously like the server on the other side The reason is this that while for all intents and purposes vps's behave like their own private individual servers They're technically all running on the same physical machine. Thanks to something called hardware virtualization We really don't have time to go into the intricacies of hardware virtualization. It's very cool If you're curious, there's some some great articles out there on the subject Now the reason that all of this is important is that There's fundamental differences between shared hosts and vps's And understanding these differences is important because they can affect the security and stability of your site See if something bad happens on one of the other sites on your shared host It could potentially affect the entire machine and therefore your site as well This sort of thing doesn't really happen with vps's See understanding this difference is so important because Depending on which kind of host you have you'll have different options at your disposal when solving problems Now there is another kind of host that we should mention Managed hosting with managed hosting someone else takes care of all of this for you And they are the ones who worry about whether you're on a shared host of vps What your backup and staging strategies are all of that stuff For a lot of wordpress admins managed hosting is a great option and there's several great choices For wordpress hosts out there. In fact, most of them have booths in the hall Now that we've covered the hardware side of servers We're going to talk about the software side because the term server is also used to describe The software that runs on your server hardware and serves your website to visitors Kind of works like this The most common type of server software in the wordpress world is apache And while there are others that work with wordpress apache is still the most common Now if we back up a moment and talk about this little interaction here How does this work exactly? How does your computer know which server to connect to when it's trying to request a website? Well, that's all thanks to domain names You're probably already familiar with domain names, but we're going to take a real quick moment here and talk about Behind the scenes of domain names and to do that we have to start by talking about ip addresses An ip address is a numerical identifier corresponding to a computer on the internet Every server that connects to the internet gets an ip address. It's how servers differentiate themselves And while computers are pretty great with remembering numbers, uh, we humans kind of suck at it So that's why we invented domain names because they're easier to remember And domain names and ip addresses are tied together with something called dns Now we can explain the way dns works by likening an ip address to a phone number This phone number here corresponds to me. It doesn't actually that's not my real number. Don't call it. It won't work And in a similar way that fictional ip address corresponds to my website But if you think about it, that's not actually how phone numbers work Phone numbers don't correspond to people. They correspond to phones If I give my phone to someone else and you tried to reach me You wouldn't you'd reach them the person who has my phone And so in a similar way ip addresses don't actually correspond to websites They correspond to servers if you move to a different host or a different server you get a different ip address And if you want your domain name to still point to your website You need to change your dns settings to point that domain name to your new ip address On your new server so you can kind of think of dns is operating like a giant phone book I did promise we'd talk about php Eventually it stands for php hypertext processing It's a language which runs on your server wordpress is written in php wordpress plugins and themes are also written in php And the most common thing to do with php is to use it to connect to databases Why well all of your content lives in databases all your posts and pages all your categories and tags Everything it's in your database. You can kind of think of it as a virtual filing cabinet where all of the stuff from your site lives And when we're talking about databases and wordpress the most popular database software is mysql When people are talking about mysql they often are also talking about something called php my admin It's a database administration tool. Why would you need this? Well, because if you want to administer your database, it's going to look something like this This is the mysql command line interface and it's scary looking On the other hand, this is what php my admin looks like and while admittedly It is certainly complex and has a lot of different options and functionality. It's easier to use than the command line Finally we come to the term stack stack is used to describe the combination of software that makes your website work And for wordpress. It's almost always a lamp stack Linux the underlying operating system with a patchy mysql and php You'll also hear of things like a map stack or a wamp stack and in addition to being fun to say they're usually used for developing your wordpress website locally And there you go. That was really fast I hope that you picked up a few things But more importantly as I said at the outset this isn't to make you fluent in understanding developer But hopefully it gives you a foundation that you can build on in the future to understand more of these concepts That's me. I that's my twitter handle. I'm a freelance designer and developer And slides and more are all at that bit. Link. Thank you