A Little about Wordpress

Wordpress is an open-source blog-publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL and is licensed under the GPL.

The first version of Wordpress is released on May 27, 2003 by Matt Mullenweg. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world. Being an open source project, wordpress is free to use and also open to develop without paying a license fee to anyone.

There are two different versions of wordpress, one is Wordpress.com and the other being Wordpress.org.

About Wordpress.Com



It is similar to that of blogspot.com which let users to create free blogs based on wordpress (Ex: myblog.wordpress.com). A very big disadvantage of wordpress.com based blogs is that they can't be monetized or customizable. You can only use the options that are offered to you and cannot go beyond those limitations.

About Wordpress.Org

You can download and install the software script (wordpress build) that was found on this site. To install, you need to have a web host who meets the minimum requirements of wordpress such as PHP and MySQL supported web hosting servers. Once you are done with the setup, you are free to customize it as you needed and you can also monetize using the advertising programs.

Advantages of Wordpress

The first and the main advantage of Wordpress is the "permalinks" option which let users to set the URL structure as they like (which is not at all possible in blogger). It has an inbuilt capability of performing SEO tactics which help to rank our blog in search engines.

Though started as just a blogging system, wordpress has evolved to be used as a complete CMS and so you can customize it as you like using different wordpress plugins, widgets and themes.

Key Developers of Wordpress

Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little were co-founders of the project. The core contributing developers include Ryan Boren, Mark Jaquith, Matt Mullenweg, Andrew Ozz, and Peter Westwood.

WordPress is also developed by its community, including WP testers, a group of volunteers who test each release. They have early access to nightly builds, beta versions and release candidates. Errors are documented in a special mailing list, or the project's Trac tool.

Though largely developed by the community surrounding it, WordPress is closely associated with Automattic, the company founded by Matt Mullenweg.

Info & Image Credits : [Wordpress] and [Wikipedia]