WordPress is an open source, free and one of the most powerful Content Management Systems (CMS). It is based on a popular server side programming language PHP and MySQL database. WordPress was first introduced in 2003 and quickly became a prominent CMS platform. Currently it runs on more than 80 million websites which is approx 27% of total websites on the internet.What is WordPress?

Hugely Popular

WordPress popularity comes from the fact that it is easy enough to be handled by non technical people and powerful enough to be extended by developers with an exhaustive set of  hooks and filters, neatly documented in the Codex.

WordPress is backed by a passionate community of developers, testers, evangelists and bloggers. While in the initial days it started as merely a blogging platform, today it is used by mega news outlets to huge eCommerce organisations.

Extend It To Your Liking

WordPress comes with an exhaustive set of free themes and plugins. While the themes help you control the look and presentation of your website, plugins extend and expand the functionality of your site.

Outside the native WordPress community, there exist several thriving marketplaces where developers and companies sell WordPress themes and plugins.

WordPress is released under GPLv2 license. GPL mandates that the derivative work should inherit the GPL license itself. Themes and plugins are regarded as derivative works and hence they inherit GPL license.

WordPress can be downloaded from the official repository. Owing to the popularity of WordPress, most of the web-hosts provide a one-click install service.

The ease of use is such that one can start publishing the articles within minutes of installing WordPress on their site. You just have to put your content in text format and rest of the things will be taken care by the CMS.

WordPress has a tool-bar on its post/page editor to craft your text in various formats without needing to edit the code of the page. This tool-bar is equipped with everything which a regular user may need. Also that editor have options to upload images or other media files in your posts to make your post/page presentable.WordPress Editor Toolset

Good at SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing website’s traffic through organic search engine results.

Here is an excellent primer on SEO – The Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It is one of the important things to do to make sure your website ranks high on Google, Baidu, Bing or other search engines. WordPress is one of the most SEO friendly CMS and it is fully W3C compatible. It has built in option for RSS, ping functionality. A clean and search engine friendly code helps you improve website’s online visibility easily in search engines. A former Google’s web spam head – Matt Cutts – once mentioned “WordPress is made to do well for SEO”.

Some of the famous blogs like Techcrunch and Mashable use WordPress. Top news website like New York Times and CNN’s on-air personality blogs use WordPress as well. We, at Ajonit, use this excellent CMS for both the Ajonit free tutorials website as well as the VIP Ajonit section.

Trivia:

  • WordPress should always be written with W and P in capital letters.
  • Never buy a domain name with the word WordPress in it. It is a trademarked word by The WordPress Foundation and they don't allow any domain name with their trademark in it.