Step One – History and generals features
WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product.
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Features
WordPress is a powerful semantic publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant, and appealing as possible. We are proud to offer you a freely distributed, standards-compliant, fast, light, and free content management system, with sensible default settings and features, and an extremely customizable core.
You are free to do whatever you like with the WordPress code, extend it or modify in any way or use it for commercial projects without any licensing fees. That is the beauty of free software, free meaning not only price but also the freedom to have complete control over it.
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Proven
WordPress powers more than a quarter of new sites today, is the content management system (CMS) of choice for nearly a half of the top million sites making it the most popular on the web, and is trusted by content publishers both large and small including CNN and the NY Times.
Easy to use
At the core of WordPress is a simple interface similar to the desktop publishing software you use today. With no coding experience or expert knowledge necessary, the learning curve is often about as short as typing in your site’s URL and logging in. In fact, most users are able to pick up the basics without any training at all. Interfaces are polished and easy to use, and are the result of years of refinement. It’s the power of Microsoft Word with the intuitiveness of an iPhone.
Built for Publishing
WordPress makes sharing content and attracting readers to your site a breeze. Whether pushing content to social networks, ensuring that your website is provided in the optimal format to appear at the top of search results the moment you hit publish, or providing visitors the ability to subscribe to specific content sub-feeds in their favorite feed reader (or even via e-mail), WordPress is not simply a website, but rather a content-publishing platform. With a single click, you have a powerful megaphone to broadcast your message to the world.
Backed by Community Support
WordPress is supported by a vibrant community of users who have already solved many of the toughest challenges to sharing information today. WordPress Version 4.6 has been downloaded more than 20 million times since it was released a few months ago. With a library of more than 50,000 free, open-source Plugins and Themes growing each day, and hundreds of core contributors each release cycle, the WordPress community is an ecosystem built around the platform’s viability and proven success.
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Content is King
Your Entire Workflow
WordPress can take the place of your entire workflow from the initial draft to the time you hit publish – spelling, grammar, collaboration, and review – there’s no need for e-mails back and forth or expensive desktop software.
Beyond Black and White
Everything that makes webpages feel rich – pictures, videos, music, documents – can feel right at home in WordPress. With a drag-and-drop file uploader that uses the latest technology to ensure your file effortlessly makes it to the web page every time, and a media browser to help you store, organize and find the files you’re looking for, WordPress hosts the files that make your pages pop.
Distraction Free Writing
Between E-Mail, IMs, Texts, Tweets, and Status Updates, we have enough distractions in today’s world. Your publishing platform should not be one of them. While writing, WordPress literally fades away, letting you concentrate on your ideas themselves, not how you’re getting them out there.
Never Lose a Word
WordPress automatically saves your work as you type so you don’t have to worry if your computer crashes or you make a mistake. Want to go back to a previous version? Not a problem. Every time you hit save, WordPress creates a snapshot that you can restore with a single click.
Time Travel
Okay, not really, but it’s pretty close. WordPress lets you schedule posts for some time in the future or lets you backdate a post for some time in the past so that you can write when it’s convenient for you.
Publish Anywhere
The internet’s everywhere, so why shouldn’t your workflow be? WordPress has mobile applications for Android, iOS, Blackberry, Nokia, Windows Phone 7, even WebOS. Wherever you are, control of your site is literally at your fingertips. Phone not listed? No fret. You can even post to your site by e-mail.
Save Drafts
Save your unfinished articles, improve them later, publish when you’re done.
Previewing Posts
Before you press the « Publish » button, you can look at the preview for the article you just wrote to check if everything is the way you want it. In fact, you can do that at any time, since the preview is « live ».
Even the URLs are Beautiful
Ever go to a site and look up to the URL bar only to see a string of letter and number gobbledygook? WordPress realizes that websites are built for people, not computers. Every URL is intuitively written for humans and describes what your content says, not where it sits in a database.