Wordpress Introduction

Wordpress can be used as CMS (content management system) it has everything you would to build a website, further if something is missing you can rely on their great developer community to have built a plugin to overcome any such short comings.
You can even build a high end news website on Wordpress using one those magazine style themes.

I was thinking about what should be the first post on this blog. I already had the introduction post wherein I made everyone aware about the idea behind this blog. So when I thought about it, I realized that the first official post has to be an introduction about the platform we will be talking about in rest of our posts i.e. WordPress. I know that there are numerous posts out there which talk about WordPress, its features and how good a CMS platform it is. However everyone has a different style of writing and everyone has different views about WordPress. Also the kind of work I do with WordPress may not be exactly the same as others and hence when I thought of this idea of writing an introduction post about WordPress. I had the complete layout in my mind, along with the things that I wanted to mention about WordPress and my love towards it. Although WordPress needs no introduction being the De-facto CMS leader, I take it as an opportunity to let the world know about WordPress in my words.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open source content management system (CMS) built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under GPL license. It has been created out of an open source software called b2 which was launched in 2001 by Michel Valdrighi as a weblog or blog publishing tool. Later Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress along with Mike little took b2 as the base and created WordPress out of it. The initial idea was to have a blogging platform for everyday writing with enhance typography and better user experience. Till version 3.0, it was mainly a blogging platform, however with the release of custom post types, custom menu management and other feature enhancements; it became a full-fledged CMS which can be used to create a website of any kind. WordPress is very user friendly, extensible to your imagination and has all the nuts and bolts that you would need to create a web application of any sort. It has been used in many different ways and the extent to which you can extend it is only limited by your imagination. WordPress supports themes, plugins and hooks, these let your separate the presentation layer of your site completely from the code behind it. You can decide how your WordPress site should look and feel without touching the core files of WordPress. You can also add new features by using plugins. All this you can do without knowing a single line of code. The beauty of WordPress is that it shapes up in the form as you want to see it. It is equally good and user friendly for a novice and a tech savvy.

List of Features

The reason WordPress is the most used CMS today is because of its simplicity and extensibility. Its so easy to install, configure and extend. This is the reason that every time I get an opportunity of developing a web application, I look up to WordPress and its provides the required extensibility to create such solutions. With conditional tags, social media integration, Support for Widget and Drag and drop widget interface, it becomes cake walk to manage a WordPress powered website. Its so easy and user friendly that you don’t have to worry about the geeky stuffs like Search engine optimization (SEO), WordPress out of the box is 80% optimized for SEO, so you have to really not worry about working on your site’s SEO. There are so many innovative features exclusively available with WordPress like ping feature which pings all the major web services every time you publish a content. It supports Multisite which can be used to create community websites and social networking websites. Also WordPress has the most detailed and updated documentation available online covering each and every bit of it. It is such a helpful resource for everyone interested into WordPress development. The code generated by WordPress is also W3C compliant and it makes your life easier in getting your site validated by W3C if you are using WordPress.
Its really hard putting all the features of WordPress inside a single post, however here is a brief list of the important features of WordPress

• Standard Compliant code
• Support for creating static pages
•  WordPress Links
• Themes
• Plugins
• Cross blog communication tools
• Comments
• Spam Protection
• Full User Management
• Password protected posts
• Easy installation and upgrades
• Easy Imports – It allows you to import your content from major publishing platforms
• XML-RPC Interface
• Workflow
• Typographical niceties
• Intelligent text formatting
• Multiple authors
• Bookmarkets
• Ping away

WordPress has a very democratic approach of including features. It is community software and it includes features driven by ideas voted by users.