Dara Skolnick, who has a beautiful personal blog, writes a tip on Tuesdays for developers. She has a two-part series on developing locally.
As you’ve probably already figured out, WordPress is written in PHP, which is a server-side language. This means that the website has to communicate with a server in order to display the pages, unlike a static HTML website. WordPress, like most content management systems, separates the site’s structure (which is PHP-based) from its content (which is stored in a MySQL database). The server is what brings the two together, and this is why you need a server with PHP and MySQL to run WordPress.
Why do I enjoy this? Because when I started hacking away on websites the amount of information available to me wasn’t a hundredth of what is available today. Still, Dara finds a way to make these posts approachable, beautiful, and valuable for beginners.
Great, great blogging.