It was first released on May 27, 2003, by founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of December 2011, version 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times.

WordPress has a web template system using a template processor.

Themes

WordPress 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 informational content. Themes may be installed by using the Wordpress "Dashboard" administration tool, or by uploading theme folders via FTP. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations.

Plugins

One very popular feature of WordPress is its rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its abilities beyond the features that are part of the base install; WordPress has a database of over 18,000 plugins with purposes ranging from SEO to adding widgets.

Widgets

Widgets are small modules that offer users drag-and-drop sidebar content placement and implementation of many plugins' extended abilities. Widgets allow WordPress developers to add functionality to their sites. These small modules can be used to add functionality such as a slideshow, Facebook-like box, small news slider, and more.

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 just WPMU) was a fork of WordPress created to allow multiple blogs to exist within one installation that 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.

WordPress MU merged with WordPress as part of the 3.0 release.

Mobiles

Native applications exist for WebOS, Android, iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad)Windows Phone 7, and BlackBerry which provide access to some of the features in the WordPress Admin panel and work with WordPress.com and many WordPress.org blogs.

Other features of note

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.

History

b2/cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog, was the precursor to WordPress. b2/cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2,000 blogs as of May 2003. It was written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress. Although WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck Tremoulet, a friend of Mullenweg.

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package were changed by Six Apart and many of its most influential users migrated to WordPress. By October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source content management system Market Share Report reached the conclusion that WordPress enjoyed the greatest brand strength of any open source content management systems.

Awards

In 2007 WordPress won a Packt Open Source CMS Award.

In 2009 WordPress won the Packt best Open Source CMS Awards.

In 2010 WordPress won the Hall of Fame CMS category in the 2010 Open Source Awards.

In 2011 WordPress won the Open Source Web App of the Year Award at The Critters.

Removal of sponsored themes

On July 10, 2007, following a discussion on the WordPress ideas forum and a post by Mark Ghosh in his blog Weblog Tools Collection, Matt Mullenweg announced that the official WordPress theme directory at http://themes.wordpress.net would no longer host themes containing sponsored links. Although this move was criticized by designers and users of sponsored themes,[citation needed] it was applauded by WordPress users who consider such themes to be spam. The official WordPress theme directory ceased to accept any new themes, including those without sponsored links, shortly after the announcement was made. Sponsored themes are still available elsewhere, as well as free themes with additional sponsored links added by third parties.

On July 18, 2008, a new theme directory opened at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/. It was styled along the same lines as the plug-ins directory, Any theme that is uploaded to it will be vetted, first by an automated program and then by a human.

On December 12, 2008, over 200 themes were removed from the WordPress theme directory as they did not comply with GPL License requirements. Today, author mentions are permitted in each theme but the official policy does not allow for sponsorships or links to sites distributing non-GPL compatible themes. Non-GPL compliant themes are now hosted on other theme directories.

Read the full article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress