Wordpress

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WordPress, a publishing platform, was started in 2003 and has now grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, both used and read by millions of people. An Open Source project, you can use it without paying any license fee.

It was released in May 2003 by Matt Mullenweg as a fork of b2/cafelog. By September 2009, it is being used by 202 million websites worldwide.

Where Wordpress.Org lets you download and install a software script called WordPress. On your web host, you can also employ their service better known as WordPress.com which lets you get started with a new and free WordPress-based blog in seconds.

Features

• WordPress lets you be part of various blogging communities where you can grab all the information about your specific interests. .

• WordPress offers a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between.

• It 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.

• WordPress also supports the Track back and Ping back in order to display links to other sites that have them linked to a post or article.

• On WordPress, you can control the presentation of content by editing the templates using the Template Editor tool and the Template Tags.

• It supports Template tags, making it easier to design the content and information displayed on your weblog.

• You can skin your weblog using readily available themes, or styles. You can also create and share your own themes.

• A large number of user-developed plugins are already available and can be used to do virtually anything you want to, with your blog.

• Users can share something with some people, but not everyone by protecting the articles with a password.

• You can draft posts and update the times, where the post would appear on the weblog at a future date, automatically.

• If your post is too long, cut it up into pages, so your readers don't have to scroll to the end of the world.

• You can upload pictures or files, and link to them or display them in your articles.

• Users can organize the posts into categories, and sub-categories, and even further categorize them.

• WordPress allows character smiley to convert into the graphical image counterparts.

• You can save your unfinished articles as drafts. Also, you can preview your posts before publishing them.

• You can add blogs to WordPress through email as well.

• WordPress provides you with several ready made options to display the archives of your blog, containing all the old posts. You can choose from yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, category-wise or author-wise archives and easily uplink them.

• The feature WordPress Pages allows you to manage non-blog content easily.

• Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.

• WordPress allows you to manage spam with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker.

• If you choose, WordPress allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog.

• WordPress allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.

• WordPress also supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.

Statistics

There are over 18 million WordPress publishers as of November 2009: 9.2 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 9.7 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.Around 220 million people visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month. Source: Wordpress

• Total WordPress.com blogs since the launch

• Traffic Summary