A Beautiful Blogging and CMS platform

WordPress is open-source software that can be downloaded here

There are excellent support forums and there’s plenty of documentation

Themes provide the look of your blog and plugins add extra functionality.

The great thing about WordPress is its flexibility – it’s possible to make it do virtually anything. It’s also frequently updated and just keeps getting better and better!

In More Detail …

WordPress is Open Source software, essentially meaning that anyone can contribute to it and anyone can use it (for free). The basic code was first written by jazz saxophonist Matt Mullenweg in 2003. Matt is now part of a company called Automattic which employs seasoned coders and owns the WordPress trademark. Automattic is the company behind the free Akismet anti comment-spam software incorporated into WordPress.

Technical Stuff

WordPress uses a modular, easily analysed system of code. The core files remain unmodified by end-users but a system of ‘Plugins’ can adapt functions from those core files and change the way in which WordPress works. Many people contribute plugins, which can be uploaded from within the WordPress user interface.

WordPress designers create ‘themes’. Themes display content that the user enters from within their web-based interface. Text, photos, videos and podcasts are typical content that can all be entered by the user. The designer’s job is not only to create a theme that looks nice but one that’s easy to adapt, neatly coded and easy to use.

The WordPress theme designer wraps HTML and PHP around a few lines of code that interface with the WordPress core files to make a new theme that will do this job.