What is WordPress?

If you are a blogger or want to blog, then you have probably heard of WordPress.  But, for those of you who have no idea what this is, I’ll be happy to explain it to you.  WordPress is probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) that is in existence today.  For those of you out there who are techie geeks, then you probably already know that WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool that is written in PHP.  But, why should this matter to you?

 

Who uses WordPress?

WordPress is one of the most popular avenues for publishing to the web.  There are many famous blogs, news outlets, music sites, Fortune 500 companies as well as celebrities using WordPress.  Some famous blogs that use WordPress are:

  •         Mashable
  •         TechCrunch
  •         The New York Times’ blogs
  •         CNN’s on-air personality blogs

If you are ever curious as to whom else uses WordPress, just take a look at the WordPress site showcase page to discover the number of well-known sites and famous people who are using this popular web-publishing tool.

 

WordPress 101

WordPress opened its doors in 2003.  At this time it only offered a single bit of code that heightened the formatting of your everyday writing while boasting very few users.  But, since then it has become the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world!  WordPress is now used by millions of sites and there are tens of millions of people who visit a WordPress site every day.

 

An Open Source Project

WordPress is an Open Source project.  This means that there are hundreds of people, all over the world, who are working on it which is more than most commercial platforms.  You are also free to use WordPress for anything.  People use WordPress for various platforms; from sharing recipes to being used by Fortune 500 company websites.  One of the perks to using WordPress is the fact that you do not have to pay anyone a licensing fee and there are numerous freedoms that are important to its users.

 

WorPress.org

This is the site where you can download and install the software script of WordPress.  In order to do this you must first have a web host that meets the minimum requirements.  You will also need to have a bit of time in order to get things started.  WordPress allows you to completely customize your site and it can be used for virtually anything.  If you are pinched for cash, you can check out WordPress.com.  This allows you to get started with a new and FREE WordPress based blog in seconds.  But, it varies in many ways and is not as flexible as the version of WordPress you download and install yourself.

 

Various Uses of WordPress

WordPress started out as simply a blogging system, since it has evolved to become a full content management system.  This is due to the thousands of plugins, widgets and themes that WordPress has to offer.  Your imagination is allowed to explode with creativity when using WordPress to develop your new site!