The Technical Details of How Toastmost Works

Not everyone needs to know these details, but if you have some knowledge of databases, or HTML, or programming, you may find some of these details useful for understanding what’s going on behind the scenes.

WordPress is web content management software, which means it organizes web content in a database, serves the appropriate content to website visitors, and allows authorized users to edit that content in a visual editor, a sort of word processor. Before this type of software became popular, building a website meant hand-coding individual pages in the HTML language and uploading them to a server.

The first versions of WordPress were strictly for bloggers, as in people posting dated articles to the web, but it evolved to be able to handle other types of content.

By default, a WordPress database looks something like this:

• wp_commentmeta
• wp_comments
• wp_options
• wp_postmeta
• wp_posts
• wp_term_relationships
• wp_term_taxonomy
• wp_termmeta
• wp_terms
• wp_usermeta
• wp_users

The most important tables are wp_users (usernames and passwords), wp_options (configuration settings), and wp_posts (blog posts, web pages, and other content).

Here’s a simplified example of what’s contained in the posts table for the Toastmost Demo website. Each item has a unique ID number, a title, some content, and a post type (post for blog post, page for a static page like the home page, rsvpmaker for an event, and rsvpmaker_template for a document used as a template for events). The addition of the post_types field to this database table is what allowed WordPress to move beyond only supporting blogging websites to supporting sites where the home page might be a “Welcome to Our Toastmasters Club” page, rather than a blog listing.

WordPress plugins, or add-on software modules, can register custom post types to serve specialized functions. For example, my RSVPMaker plugin (one of the components of Toastmost) uses the rsvpmaker post type to keep events separate from blog posts and regular pages. Every RSVPMaker post has a start date and time and other options specific to events.

Each row in the posts table can also be matched with one or more rows in the postmeta table, which can be used to store additional information related to a given post document. For example:

This is where the Toastmost agenda management system stores data about the assignment of the role Speaker 2 to the user with ID # 1 (that’s me) along with information about the speech title, project, timing, and speaker introduction. This data is associated with post ID #37555, an RSVPMaker event for the Online Presenters Toastmasters meeting held on March 2, 2026.

In principle, RSVPMaker could use the postmeta table to store information about the date and time of each event, but for performance reasons its separates that information out into a custom table, wp_rsvpmaker_event. Like the postmeta table, it’s joined with the posts table by post ID 37555.

Multisite WordPress Has Separate Tables for Each Website

While wp_posts is the default posts table name, the wp_ prefix can be customized, and the structure is a little more complicated for a multisite network of websites like Toastmost, which uses a common database but separate tables for the content and settings of each site.

In the case of Online Presenters, the tables described above are actually wpt_109_posts, wpt_109_postmeta, and wpt_109_rsvpmaker_event where 109 is the ID of that specific website within the Toastmost network.

There is only one users table on Toastmost (wpt_users), allowing users to log into more than one website using the same password. But each website has its own tables for its own website content.

The HTML Markup of WordPress Blocks

As I mentioned, the point of a visual editor for web content is to minimize the need to know how to write HTML code. The editor software is supposed to take care of all that. But how does the editor do what it does? And how is it flexible enough to support not only formatting content formatting blocks like paragraphs, headings, and images but also specialized blocks representing Toastmasters agenda roles?

For those who are not at all familiar, here is an example of a heading, a paragraph, and a paragraph containing a link.

<h1>Show this as a large heading<h1>

<p>Just a simple paragraph.</p>

<p>A paragraph with a link to <a href=”https://toastmost.org”>toastmost.org</a></p>

The WordPress editor allows you to toggle between the Visual editor and the Code editor, which shows coding details. Try it, and you’ll see something slightly more complicated than the example above.

This is essentially the same code, but with HTML comments inserted above and below each content block that contain instructions for the editor.

Here’s a slightly more elaborate example, where the background color of a paragraph has been changed, and the color is specified in both the HTML comment (instructions to the editor) and the actual HTML markup of the paragraph (instructions for the display of the content).

The coding within the curly brackets, like {“style”:{“color”:{“background”:”#f7eebb”}}} is JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation. JavaScript is one of the fundamental languages of web programming, and it’s what powers the WordPress visual editor. In this case, the JSON represents instructions that the editor will use if the user wants to change the background color of the paragraph.

Occasionally, you may see this error in the visual editor, which means the JSON and HTML code are garbled or inconsistent in some way.

Usually, clicking on Attempt recovery will resolve the issue.

JSON can also be used to set parameters for scripted interactions like database lookups and the display of interactive widgets. For example, here’s what the coding for an agenda role block looks like.

This says the role is Speaker, and we’re planning for 3 speakers and allowing 23 minutes on the agenda for their speeches. This will be displayed in the editor as a block with options for setting those properties, on the signup page as a form prompting for three speakers to sign up, and on the printable agenda as the names, speech titles, and other details for the three speakers.

The code to display custom blocks like the role block in the editor is written in JavaScript, using the React framework and user interface components supplied by the WordPress Gutenberg project.

The server-side programming code of the website, which is mostly PHP rather than JavaScript, can also parse the JSON in blocks and use it when generating the HTML that is sent to a site visitor’s browser. The PHP code determines which template is loaded, how components of the template such as the header and footer are inserted into the layout, as detailed below, and any given block should be presented as simple HTML or used to generate dynamic content like a recent blog post listing or a Toastmasters role assignment.

Block Theme Templates

The most customizable WordPress themes are also built around blocks, mostly placeholder blocks for elements like the page or post content.

In the visual editor, a block template looks like this:

For the most part, you’re seeing placeholders for content, like the block title (shown here just saying Title), which will be replaced by the actual title of the page when a page in this template. Ditto for the gray block, which will be replaced by the featured image for the page or post if one has been set.

The coding for a block theme template could be as simple as this:

This says:

• Display the header (which typically includes the site title, site logo, and main navigation menu)
• Display the featured image, if defined, followed by the title, and the content of the page
• Display the footer

The real version from the Twenty Twenty-Five theme is a little more elaborate, with additional blocks for formatting that “wraps” around the page featured image, title, and content.

The line up top that imports the header does a lot of work because the header itself is a reasonably complex document with lots of layout blocks and few functional ones like navigation (highlighted). The navigation block is yet another document that includes multiple navigation item blocks.

This explains why you have to click a couple of times to drill down from the overall template view to editing the header, to editing the navigation block within the heading, to editing an individual navigation block.

How plugins enhance WordPress

A “plain vanilla” WordPress website will let you publish blog posts and web pages, switch themes (designs), and change basic settings like whether the home page should be display a blog listing or a welcome page.

Many thousands of plugins are available that add functions like ecommerce or enhanced security or event marketing and promotion (RSVPMaker) or Toastmasters agenda management (the Toastmost plugin, a.k.a. RSVPMaker for Toastmasters).

WordPress provides many “hook” actions and filters that plugin authors use to modify the behavior of the core system. For example, before the content of any page or other document is displayed, WordPress checks whether any filter functions have been registered for a filter called “the_content” — and if RSVPMaker detects the content is related to the rsvpmaker post type, it looks up the event date and time to be displayed at the top of the document. It also checks the postmeta table for event specific parameters like whether event registrations should be collected and, if so, displays the RSVP form.

Similarly, when the administrator’s dashboard is displayed, hooks allow me to specify additional menus and submenus for RSVPMaker and for the Toastmasters features. In the process, I specify whether those menus should be displayed for all users or just those with administrative rights.

WordPress plugins are written in a combination of PHP and JavaScript, plus Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) formatting code, according to standards that are documented at wordpress.org.

On an independent website, administrators can choose to install any of many thousands of WordPress plugins for different purposes. The Toastmost service makes many popular plugins available, and enables several useful ones by default, for example Yoast SEO. Additional plugins can be added on request.

Poorly coded WordPress plugins can also be a source of security problems, and Toastmost takes responsibility for ensuring the security and dependability of the plugins made available on the service. One particular plugin, WordFence, is installed specifically for the purpose of identifying problem plugins and other security hazards.

Open Source Code

WordPress is open source software, meaning it is licensed in such a way that anyone with the technical knowhow can review its source code and recommend improvements. That is also true of the core Toastmost plugins, both of which are available on the Github service as well as in the WordPress repository:

http://github.com/davidfcarr/rsvpmaker

https://github.com/davidfcarr/rsvpmaker-for-toastmasters

If you have ideas about how to improve the code, don’t be shy.