Wordpress is perfect for blogging or for creating and maintaining simple webpages. WordPress has a web template system using a template processor. It means that once a template is determined and installed, the user can focus on content using WordPress controls.

WordPress users may install and switch between themes. Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website or installation without altering the informational content. Themes may be installed by using the Wordpress "Dashboard" administration tool, or by uploading theme folders via FTP.[9] The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations.

One very popular feature of WordPress is its rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install; WordPress has a database of over 17,000 plugins[10] with purposes ranging from SEO to adding widgets.

Widgets offer users drag-and-drop sidebar content placement and implementation of many plugins' extended capabilities. Users can rearrange widgets without editing PHP or HTML code.

Prior to WordPress 3.0, WordPress supported one blog per installation, although multiple concurrent copies may be run from different directories if configured to use separate database tables. WordPress Multi-User (WordPress MU, or just WPMU) was a fork of WordPress created to allow multiple blogs to exist within one installation that is able to be administered by a centralized maintainer. WordPress MU makes it possible for those with a website to host their own blogging community, as well as control and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. WordPress MU adds eight new data tables for each blog.

WordPress MU merged with WordPress as part of the 3.0 release.

Native applications exist for Android,[13] iPhone/iPod Touch,[14] iPad, Windows Phone 7, and BlackBerry[16] which provide access to some of the features in the WordPress Admin panel and work with WordPress.com and many WordPress.org blogs.

WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters are also included, providing standardized formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes). WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article.

b2/cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog, was the precursor to WordPress.[17] b2/cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2,000 blogs as of May 2003. It was written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress. Although WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2.[18] The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of Mullenweg.

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package were changed by Six Apart and many of its most influential users migrated to WordPress.[20][21] By October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source content management system Market Share Report reached the conclusion that WordPress enjoyed the greatest brand strength of any open source content management systems.
[edit] Awards

In 2007 WordPress won a Packt Open Source CMS Award.

In 2009 WordPress won the Packt best Open Source CMS Award.

In 2010 WordPress won the Hall of Fame CMS category in the 2010 Open Source

In 2011 WordPress won the Open Source Web App of the Year Award at The Critters.

Future

After the release of WordPress 3.0, the development team took a release cycle off from the WordPress software to focus on expanding and improving the WordPress community. WordPress 3.1 was subsequently released in February, 2011. With version 3.2, released on July 4, 2011, the minimum requirement PHP version and MySQL were raised as well.