What is Wordpress? , A Short History: Word Press and Friends, Word press use current state, Where do you get started?

• WHAT IS WORD-PRESS?

WordPress is one of the most popular open source blogging systems available, with global and vibrant user, developer, and support communities. Though it can be compared to TypePad, Moveable Type, Google’s Blogger, and the Apache Roller project as a user-generated content workhorse, WordPress distinguishes itself with a broad array of hosting options, functional extensions (plugins), and aesthetic designs and elements (themes).

With the rise of self-publishing, low-cost web hosting and freely available core components like the MySQL database, blogging software followed the same trend as most other digital technologies, moving from high-end, high-cost products to widely available, low-cost consumer or ‘‘hobbyist’’ systems. WordPress isn’t simply about creating a blog so that you can have a digital diary attached to your vanity URL; it has evolved into a full-fledged content management system used by individuals and enterprises alike. This section takes a brief tour through the early history of WordPress and brings you up to speed on the current release and user community.

• A Short History: WordPress and Friends

WordPress started similarly to many other popular open source software packages: Some talented developers saw a need to create a powerful, simple tool based on an existing project licensed under the GPL. Michel Valdrighi’s b2/cafelog system provided the starting point, and WordPress was built as a fork of that base by developers Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress first appeared in 2003,also built on the MySQL open source database for persisting content and PHP as the development platform. Valdrighi remains a contributor to the project, which thrives and depends on a growing and interested community of users and developers.

As with other systems written in PHP, it is self-contained in the sense that installation, configuration, operation, and administration tasks are all contained in PHP modules. WordPress’s popularity has been driven in part by its simplicity, with the phrase ‘‘five minute installation’’ making appearances in nearly every description or book about WordPress. Beyond getting to a first post, WordPress was designed to be extended.

WordPress today is supported by a handful of core developers and just under 100 key contributors. Mike Little today runs the WordPress specialty shop zed1.com and he contributes the occasional patch to the code. Matt Mullenweg’s company, Automattic, continues to operate the wordpress.com hosting service as well as fund development of related content management tools: WordPress MU, a multi-user version of WordPress that is at the heart of the wordpress.com hosting system. Pronounce it ‘‘EM-YOU’’ or take the rather scholarly ‘‘MYU’’ approach if you want to impress your Greek or mathematically inclined friends. Gravatar dynamically serves images tied to e-mail addresses, providing a hosted icon with a variety of display options. Think of it as a service to make hot-linking your profile picture technically and socially acceptable.

As a content management system, the WordPress system definition doesn’t stop at time-serialized posts with comments. BuddyPress is a set of themes and plugins that extends WordPress into a functional social networking platform, allowing registered users to message and interact with each other, again with all content managed within the WordPress framework. Similarly, bbPress is a PHP- and MySQLbased system designed for forums (bulletin boards) that is distinct from WordPress but is commonly integrated with it.

We cover some of these WordPress adjunct systems in ‘‘The WordPress Developer Community,’’ but they’re included here to provide a sense of how WordPress has expanded beyond a basic single-user-oriented tool. At the same time, we’re not endorsing or making a commercial for Automattic, but delving into the guts of WordPress without a spin of the propeller hat toward Mullenweg and Little is somewhere between incorrigible and bad community behavior.

• Word press use current state

Exactly how popular and prevalent is WordPress usage? ‘‘Popular’’ is always a subjective metric, but statistics add some weight to those perceptions. Jason Calacanis claimed 202 million websites using WordPress in Episode 16 of ‘‘This Week in Startups’’ (September 2009). That includes sites using WordPress for content management, blogging, and personal rants, and has to be discounted by those of us who have multiple WordPress installations to their names, but even with that order of magnitude estimate, WordPress is immensely popular.

Here are download statistics for the core WordPress system:

1. 2006: 1.5 million (source: WordPress.org)
2. 2007: 3.8 million (source: WordPress.org)
3. 2008:More than 11 million (source: Matt Mullenweg’s WordCamp NYC keynote)

Hosted blogs on wordpress.com now number over 4.6 million, with more than 35 million posts over the 2008 calendar year, reaching a run rate of about 4 million posts per month; again those statistics are courtesy of Mullenweg’s WordCamp NYC keynote (available on WordCampTV for your viewing pleasure). The plugin population went from about 370 in 2006, to 1,384 in 2007, with more than 6,300 currently registered as reported on WordP ess.org. The combinations of plugins and themes require
scientific notation to represent in complexity, but at the same time, they’re all equally simple to locate,integrate, and use. That’s the result of a solid architecture and an equally solid community using it.

Today, WordPress powers CNN’s blogs, the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D, and the irreverent but snowclone-driven icanhazcheeseburger.com. (If you looked for a backstory on ‘‘snowclone,’’ apologies, but that’s also the joy of discovering new facts in a culture of participatory media).

• Where do you get started?

wordpress.org is the home for the current released and in-development versions of the code. Click down to wordpress.org/extend for a starting point in finding plugins, themes, and wish lists of ideas and features to be implemented.
wordpress.com has both free and paid hosting services. Over at wordpress.org/hosting you’ll find a list of hosting providers that support WordPress and often include some additional first-time installation and configuration support in their packaging of the code for delivery as part of their hosting services.

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