Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1
GETTING STARTED WITH
WORDPRESS
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is the leading blogging tool, period. It's popular with rank
beginners, mainstream bloggers, business bloggers, and pros. People
use it to post their thoughts for a few friends—and to reach hundreds of
thousands of people a day.
WordPress is notable for several reasons. The backbone of all WordPress
blogs is free, open source software. Michel Valdrighi developed the orig-
inal software, called
b2\cafelog
; he's now a contributing developer to
WordPress. The current WordPress software first appeared in 2002 as a
new version or “fork” by Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg, now the most
visible leader of the WordPress community.
Matt founded Automattic in 2005. Automattic is the business behind
WordPress.com, the free, hosted version of WordPress, and Akismet, the
spam blocker built for WordPress.
WordPress is the jewel in the crown of the blogging world. Other blog-
ging tools tend to be less capable, less popular, more limited, more
expensive, or a combination of these. Only WordPress has the combina-
tion of ease of (initial) use, power, flexibility, and low cost that have
made it the leading tool for blogging.
There are three keys to WordPress's power: its multiple versions, its
user community, and its status as a free or low-cost tool.
