Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at 📚 WordPress Overview.

So, let’s talk about WordPress. If you’ve spent any time in the web industry, you’ve almost certainly come across it. WordPress is a content management system built on PHP, and it’s genuinely enormous in scale — it powers more than forty percent of all websites on the internet. That’s not a small number. From simple personal blogs all the way through to complex web applications, WordPress handles an impressive range of use cases, and the reason it can do that comes down to a few core design decisions around plugins, themes, and its REST API. We’ll get into all of those.

Let’s start with the most fundamental building blocks — content types. When you first set up a WordPress site, you get two out of the box. You have posts, which are typically your blog articles and time-based content, and you have pages, which are meant for static content that doesn’t change much — things like an About page or a Contact page. But here’s where it gets interesting. WordPress lets you go well beyond those two defaults through something called Custom Post Types. If you’re building a site that needs to manage videos, or products, or reviews, you can define entirely new content types that sit alongside posts and pages and behave just like them. That flexibility is a big part of why WordPress scales so well across different kinds of projects.

Now, once you have content, you need ways to organise it. That’s where taxonomies come in. You’re probably familiar with the built-in ones — categories and tags — but just like post types, taxonomies can be custom too. You might create a taxonomy called genres if you’re running a music site, or regions if you’re managing location-based content. It’s the same underlying system, just tailored to your needs.

Next up, and this one is really central to how WordPress works under the hood — hooks. There are two kinds: action hooks and filter hooks. The idea behind both is that WordPress fires off signals at specific points during its execution, and your plugin or theme can listen for those signals and respond to them. Action hooks let you run additional code at a given moment, while filter hooks let you intercept data and modify it before it’s used. The really important thing here is that this system lets you customise or extend WordPress behaviour without ever touching the core files themselves. That’s a key principle — you don’t edit core, you hook into it. It keeps your changes safe when WordPress updates.

Speaking of themes and plugins, let’s cover those quickly. A theme controls how your site looks. It’s made up of template files, stylesheets, and assets like images and fonts. When someone visits your site, WordPress pulls together the right template, applies your theme’s styles, and delivers the rendered page. Plugins, on the other hand, are about functionality rather than appearance. Want to add a contact form? There’s a plugin. Want to integrate with an external payment service or add SEO features? Plugins handle all of that. They’re self-contained packages that slot into WordPress and extend what it can do.

Now let’s talk about the actual file structure, because understanding where things live matters when you’re working with WordPress directly. At the top level, you have the core files. The wp-includes folder contains the core functions that make WordPress run. The wp-admin folder is your backend — the dashboard interface. Then there’s the wp-content folder, and this is the one you’ll spend the most time in. Inside it, you’ll find a themes folder, a plugins folder, and an uploads folder where media files live. The wp-content directory is essentially the home for everything site-specific and user-generated, keeping it neatly separated from the core.

Underneath all of this is a database — MySQL or MariaDB — that stores your posts, your metadata, your users, and your site options. Pretty much everything that makes your site unique lives in that database.

And finally, the REST API. WordPress exposes JSON endpoints that allow programmatic access to your content. This means external applications, mobile apps, or other services can read from and write to your WordPress site without going through the browser interface at all. It’s what makes WordPress viable as a headless CMS or as a backend that integrates with other platforms.

Which brings us to the NZRT context specifically. At NZRT, WordPress is the primary web platform for content delivery. It also integrates with the Dolibarr ERP system, which means WordPress isn’t sitting in isolation — it’s part of a broader connected stack where content and business operations talk to each other.

If you want to dig deeper after this episode, the related areas to explore are Theme Development, Plugin Development, Hooks and Filters, and the WordPress REST API — each of those builds on what we’ve covered today.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.