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What is it?

WordPress is a personal publishing platform built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of the b2/cafelog developed by Michel Valdrighi, now a contributing developer to WordPress. WordPress was originally intended to create a fork of b2, appearing in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Its roots and development go back to 2001. The software focuses on ease of use and speed. WordPress maintains an active user community, the heart of open source software. It is a mature and stable product and a true Open Source project, with hundreds of people all over the world contributing to this software product.

Who is it for?

WordPress is a self-hosted blogging tool used on hundreds of thousands of Web sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. It can be used for anything from a family pet’s home page to a Fortune 5 Web site. Blogs can be used to provide commentary or news on a particular subject or function as personal online diaries. WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost any Web presence. It is ideal for use by individuals and businesses regardless of size.

Features

WordPress is a fast and free publishing platform with sensible default settings and features and a customizable core. The generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. Changes made to entries and templates are immediately reflected on the site, eliminating the need for regenerating static pages. WordPress provides static pages to manage non-blog content easily, links to create, maintain, and update blogrolls through the administration interface, and themes to make designing everything from blogs to webzines simple.

WordPress supports cross-blog communication tools like Trackback and Pingback, as well as pinging Ping-O-Matic, allowing maximum exposure for a blog to search engines. The software offers spam protection such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam. A full user registration system allows people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments. WordPress also provides easy installation and upgrades, easy importing for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2, a Texturize engine to convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities, intelligent text formatting, a highly advanced user system, and cross-browser bookmarklets to make it easy to publish to a blog or add links to the blogroll with a minimum of effort. There are many more features included with WordPress, and these features are referred to on the WordPress Web site as “the highlights.”

Compatibility

The only requirements to run WordPress are PHP version 4.2 or greater and MySQL version 4.0 or greater. Apache or Litespeed servers are recommended, but any server that supports PHP and MySQL should work.

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