WordPress is a blog publishing application and content management system. It was first released in May 2003 by its co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as the successor to b2/cafelog. It is powered by PHP and a SQL data backend. As of September 2009, WordPress is used by 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide.

Features:

WordPress has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations. WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; multiple author capability; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters that provide for proper formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes) are also included. WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article. Finally, WordPress has a rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install.

Multi-Blogging:

WordPress supports one weblog 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) is a fork of WordPress created to allow simultaneous blogs to exist within one installation. WordPress MU makes it possible for anyone with a website to host their own blogging community, control, and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. WordPress MU adds eight new data tables for each blog.

Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress MU would be merged with WordPress as part of a future release.[24]

Lyceum is another enterprise-edition of WordPress. Unlike WordPress MU, Lyceum stores all of its information in a set number of database tables. Notable communities that use Lyceum are TeachFor.Us[25] (Teach For America teachers’ blogs), BodyBlogs and the Hopkins Blogs.

In 2008 Andy Peatling joined Automattic to continue his work on BuddyPress – a plug-in extension of WPMU that is adding missing community features to WordPress.

“Add New Post” page of the WordPress administration interface. Version 2.8

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