WordPress is one of the world’s most popular web publishing platforms for building blogs and websites. It can be customized via a wide selection of themes, extensions and plug-ins.

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home”
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WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1 million" websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, powering over 60 million websites worldwide.

It was first released on May 27, 2003, by founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of April 2013, version 3.5 had been downloaded over 18 million times.

WordPress has a web template system using a template processor. 
Features 
ThemesWordPress users may install and switch between themes. Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website or installation without altering the information content or structure of the site. Themes may be installed using the WordPress "Appearance" administration tool or theme folders may be uploaded via FTP. The PHP, HTML & CSS code found in themes can be added or edited for providing advanced features. Thousands of WordPress themes exist, some free, and some premium (paid for) templates.
 
Plugins
One very popular feature of WordPress is its rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its abilities beyond the core installation. WordPress has a database of over 24,000 plugins, each of which offer custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their site to their specific needs. These customizations range from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) enhancers to content-displaying features, such as the addition of widgets and navigation bars.
 
Widgets
Widgets are small modules that offer users drag-and-drop sidebar content placement through the implementation of plugins' extended abilities. Some of these Widgets offer customization options such as web forms to fill out, includes or excludes of data and information such as Categories, Archives and Recent Posts, optional images though slideshows and/or carousels, amongst other customization features.These small modules are typically displayed within the header (header.php), footer (footer.php) and sidebars (sidebar.php files) of websites, but can also be placed outside of said locations enabling even further customization.

Multi-user and multi-blogging
Prior to WordPress 3.0, WordPress supported one blog 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 WPMU) was a fork of WordPress created to allow multiple blogs to exist within one installation but is able to be administered by a centralized maintainer. WordPress MU makes it possible for those with a website to host their own blogging community, as well as control and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. WordPress MU adds eight new data tables for each blog.

As of the release of WordPress 3.0, WordPress MU has of since merged with WordPress.

MobilesNative applications exist for WebOS, Android, iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), Windows Phone, and BlackBerry.These applications, designed by Automattic allow a limited set of options, which include adding new blog posts and pages, commenting, moderating comments, replying to comments in addition to the ability to view the stats.

Other features
WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine–friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters are also included, providing standardized formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes). WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article. 
 

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