Our Manifest
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Advanced featuresGlossary
API
The term API stands for “Application Programming Interface.” Think of an API like a menu in a restaurant. The menu lists all the dishes you can order. When you specify what dishes you want, the restaurant’s kitchen does the work and provides you with the finished dishes. You don’t know exactly how the restaurant prepares that food, and you don’t really need to. An API is just that but for data retrieving and manipulation, a set of simple instructions that once "asked" will do all the hard work behind the scenes and return what was asked.
Benchmarking
The benchmarking is the process of gathering information and gaining different insights by comparing aspects of your business with the market leaders or the strongest competitors.
Block
Blocks are the editor blocks that are used to create content layouts in the admin panel for pages, posts or any custom post type. Drag-and-drop content blocks make it easy to customize your layouts and designs. Use content blocks to add or edit text, images, products, and much more.
Carousel
A carousel in a web environment is a slideshow for cycling through a series of content, usually built with CSS and a bit of JavaScript. It can contain a series of images, text, or even custom markup and they are everywhere. They usually have support for previous/next controls, dots and indicators.
Column
Columns are vertical "pillars" within a row that contain blocks with your content. Inside a row you can any number of columns with sizes as big as 100% width and as small as 1/12 of the parent row's width for organizing your content. Columns make it easy to split up your content within a row while making sure that everything remains structured and aligned. Similar to rows, you can make a number of adjustments to columns, add animations, hide them on specific viewports, etc.
Cookies
Cookies are small pieces of text your browser stores when you visit a website. They help the website remember information about your visit, which can both make it easier to visit the site again and make the site more useful to you by making it possible to remember when you closed a pop-up, your favorite products, your preferred dark or light mode, and a large etcetera. They are also used by many tracking services like Google Analytics to provide website owners with data about their visitors.
CSS styles
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it is essentially the set of rules that define a website's design: the layout, colors, backgrounds, variations for different devices and screen sizes... Everything that affects the look and is not strictly the content itself. CSS describes how HTML elements will be displayed, and it actually saves a lot of work, because one CSS stylesheet can be applied to multiple pages or URLs of a website, so when a change is made, the whole website will change.
Custom Post Type, CPT
Custom post types or CPTs are specific content types that have been added to WordPress using custom code or plugins. You might want to add additional content to your site but don't want to add everything as standard posts if, for instance, you want to display books, movies, hotels, Real Estate properties, your restaurant's menu, etc. In Pomatio there is no need for custom code as it has a simple click interface for managing CPTs.
Double opt-in
Double opt-in is the process of adding an additional step to the email subscription opt-in, requiring a user to verify their email address and guaranteeing a higher level of user interest and veracity of the entered email.
Dynamic content
Dynamic content is the online content that changes based on data, user behavior and preferences of the user. It is generated at the moment a user requests a page. Imagine a page content's part that gets updated automatically when you change your prices, or when you publish a new post. There are countless other examples of dynamic content, from posts to custom fields to user data (maybe a user has already created an account and your website displays the name, products that were purchased, etc.).
Extension
An extension, also referred as plugin, module, tweak or integration, is a piece of software that “plugs into” your site to add new functionality or extend existing features on your site, allowing you to create virtually any kind of website, from ecommerce stores to portfolios to directory sites. See the list of Pomatio's extensions and integrations here.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions is a term used to refer to a list of answers to typical questions that users of a website might ask. The purpose of a FAQ is generally to provide information on frequent questions or concerns. Visit our FAQ to see a live example!
Feed
A feed (often called posts listings) is a stream of posts or any other custom post type that is automatically updated when new content is published. This is very useful, as it allows your site to be dynamically in sync with your new content with zero work, maybe even in more than one place. For example, you can display your latest 3 posts on your home page, but your latest 12 posts on your blog. In this scenario, when you publish a new post, it will appear automatically on both sites.
Footer
Your website's footer is the area located at the bottom of every page, below the main body content. It usually contains navigation menus, your logo, legal and copyright info, your social networks links, etc. The term “footer” comes from the printing world, in which it is a consistent design element that is seen across all pages of a document.
Iframe
An iFrame or Inline Frame, is an element that loads another HTML element inside of a web page. It's like embedding a website (or a part of it) inside another website. They are often used to embed content like videos, maps, or other interactive elements into the page.
IMAP server
Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP, is a standard email retrieval (incoming) protocol. Email messages keep stored on the mail server and enables the recipient to view and manipulate them as if they were stored locally on their devices. If your are using IMAP, when you read an email, you don't actually download and store it on your computer but reading it from the email service. As a result, you can check your email from different devices, anywhere in the world: your phone, a computer, a friend's computer...
JavaScript
JavaScript is usually defined as the Programming Language for the Web. It is usually executed at the browser level, and can update and change both HTML and CSS, calculate, manipulate and validate data, hide or show elements, animate elements, create scroll animations or interactions, and a large etcetera.
Landing page
A landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for a campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link in an ad from Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc., in an email campaign... They do not usually encourage browsing, they are designed with a single goal: the conversion through a call to action (or CTA, for short).
Modal window
A modal or lightbox is an element that displays in front of all other page content. To return to the main content, the user must complete an action close it. Modal windows are often used to point users’ attention to an important piece of information on the website.
Page
A page is a default pre-defined post type in WordPress. They allow admins to create static pages apart from their blog posts. For example, a home page, about page, contact page, legal info, etc. Some of the key differences between posts and pages are that they are static one-off type of documents which are not chronological, they can be hierarchical (a page can have sub pages: for example a parent page titled “About us” can have a sub-page called “Our history”) and they usually have more complex design and layouts.
Parallax
Parallax scrolling is a design trend where the background content (an image or video) moves at a different speed than the foreground content while scrolling. This results in a cool 3D effect that adds a sense of depth and creates an immersive browsing experience. Its first use was in traditional animation such as early Disney’s movies or video games like Super Mario.
PHP
PHP is an acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" and it is a widely-used, open source scripting language that is executed on the server level. This programming language is used by WordPress and millions of other applications, and it is so widely used because it can do hundreds of things such as generate dynamic page content, collect form data, send and receive cookies, modify data in your database, control user-access, encrypt data and much more.
Plugin
A plugin is a software add-on that is activated on your website, enhancing its capabilities. You can refer to "Extensions" on this same Glossary page to read more about this.
POP server
A POP (Post Office Protocol) server is a mail server that retrieves email messages by contacting your email service and downloading all of your new messages from it. Once they are downloaded to your device they get deleted from the email service, so after the email is downloaded, it can only be accessed using the same computer or device. If you're using a different device, the messages that have been previously downloaded won't be available to you.
Post
A post is a piece of content, such as text or photos, published online, with an optional comment section, videos, author boxes, etc. Usually this word also refers to content published on social media, like Instagram pictures for example. Posts can be of many kinds an have many different formats.
Query
A query is a request for information to be fetched from your site’s database. In Pomatio, we call queries to the sets of rules that will match different sets of of your content (e.g. "the latest published 12 posts", or "the oldest books from the terror genre").
Relation
Post relationships are the connections between different posts of any kind of post type (i.e. posts, pages, custom post types) in a website. For example, if you have “events” and “speakers” custom post types, you can make relationships between the two types (i.e. link some speakers to an event so they get displayed automatically on the event single page).
Row
A row is a horizontal piece of content on your page that contains one or more columns inside of it, and those with images, text, a contact form, etc. A row is usually located inside a section element.
Section
In a website's page, a section is a semantic element (describes its meaning to browsers, search engines and developers) for creating standalone parts in a web page. It divides the content into groups of blocks that are related regarding content, layout and design.
SMTP server
SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and it it controls how the email that you send (outgoing) moves from your MTA (Mail Transfer Agent, the server) to another MTA. SMTP helps break down the message into different parts that only the email servers can understand.
Tabs
Tabs are a way of organizing content that allow easy navigation for the users. Tab content area occupies less space and can handle a lot of information on the web page, as it displays multiple sections in a neat way. Inside each tab, you can include any kind of content such as images, text or even complex rows.
Taxonomy
A taxonomy is a way of grouping posts together based on relationships. By default, a standard post will have two taxonomy types called Categories and Tags. With custom taxonomies, you can further customize the way you sort your content. For example, you can sort your ‘Movies’ post type using a custom taxonomy called ‘genres’, to group all the "Terror" movies.
Thumbnails
A thumbnail is a reduced-size version of a larger image or videos, usually intended to make it easier and faster to look at or organizing a group of images. Visual search engines (e.g. Google Images) also use thumbnails, as do most modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or macOS. On websites, they also avoid the need to download larger files unnecessarily. They are sometimes referred to as "preview images".
Tweak
We call tweaks to small extensions or mini-plugins that alter slightly the core behavior of WordPress and WooCommerce.
Widget
Have you ever visited a website and seen calendars, contact forms or even the weather? They are called widgets, an element of the website that displays information or provides a specific way for a user to interact with other tools or applications. They’ve become a significant part of any website design, and can include icons, pull-down menus, buttons, selection boxes, etc.