what is wordpress?

WordPress is simple, easy to use open-source and free software CMS (Content Management System). You can use this to build a website, or a blog, or a basic authoring and management of documents online. Today, WordPress records as one of the higher ranked of top 150 traffic generating websites in the Internet. With around 60 Million downloads, since its inception in 2003, it is one of the most used CMS and self-hosted blogging tool across the internet. WordPress can be downloaded free from wordpress.org and is licensed under GPL v2 (or later).

Introduction to WordPress Software:

WordPress supports both Server-Desktop and Server-Mobile (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia, WebOS) Platforms. It is diligently built with PHP, and uses MySQL as its backend database. PHP with or without MVC (Model-View-Controller architecture pattern) is one of the most accepted server-programming interpreted languages today along with other web development programming languages in the market. MySQL versatility and flexibility in terms of features or Operating systems used makes up for using just MySQL as the database for WordPress.

CMS’s in the market today vary from Web CMS to Component CMS to Enterprise CMS. The beauty of WordPress is that it is small, simple, focused (on Customization, flexibility, and scalability during development for self-hosted blog or website content) on web content management and touches partly on the component aspects of CMS with its core and UI.

WordPress Core, UI, Themes, and Plugins:

WordPress Core and UI (User Interface – Permalinks, Posts, and Pages) is small, well segregated/ organized, and secure. WordPress flexible features includes web software installation, customizable UI, customizable Themes, basic authoring security or management, Core API’s (Dashboard Widgets, Database, HTTP, File Header, Filesystem, Metadata, Options, Quicktags, Rewrite, Settings, Shortcode, Theme Modification, Transients, Widgets), addition or development of Plugins (either a widget or feature extension), and usability with Mobile Devices. This gives some inherent advantages for ease of use whether Simple CMS, Widget based CMS, Websites (text, voice, video, or images based) or Website Blog/ CMS than others that are available in the market.

With Plugins, Themes, and their development making the most important aspect of its flexibility and scalability; WordPress maintains a good Plugins and Themes repository, and respective documentation for development. There are around 1500 Plus Themes and 23,000 Plus Plugins in the repository that can be downloaded for enhanced functionality or capability. WordPress API is well designed to allow usage or development of customizable Themes and Plugins; and maintained with assistance from user community itself. Theme Development is well defined with documentation for WordPress’s Child Themes and the methods of development of custom made blog design and Layout’s. So are Plugin API and its development. This makes usage and integration with your and other websites better and easy, whether you want to customize or want to use the basic system as a blog or a simple CMS. The development is further supported by documentation in its support and community forum sections.