WordPress is a free and open-source Content Management System (CMS). With WordPress, you can easily create websites and publish content online.
American developer Matt Mullenweg and English developer Mike Little released WordPress first time on May 27, 2003.
What attracts people to WordPress is its versatility. Initially, WordPress was a blog-publishing system (platform), but over time it has evolved to support other website types, including blogs, forums, media galleries, company pages, magazines, membership sites, and learning management systems (LMS) and online stores (e-commerce).
Currently, WordPress is a complete solution for website development, known as being “a factory that makes webpages”.
WordPress is a multi-user and multi-site platform. This means that you can create as many users as you need, with different permissions. You can also manage a bunch of websites from one WordPress Multi-Site installation.
You can build different designs using WordPress themes. Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website without altering the core code or site content. Read more about themes here -> Theme (WordPress Theme).
WordPress’s plugin architecture allows users to extend the features and functionality of a website or blog. A plugin is a software component that adds a build as packages of code that extend the core functionality. WordPress plugins are packages written in PHP programming language (the same as WordPress core), which can also include: CSS, Other assets, such as images, JavaScript, jQuerry, and others. As of 2021, WordPress.org has more than 58,500 plugins available. You can read more about plugins here: WordPress plugin.
WordPress features also include:
- Integrated link management,
- A search engine–friendly clean permalink structure,
- Assigning taxonomies to posts: categories and tags ,
- Automatic filters,
- Standardised formatting and styling of text in posts,
- Support for the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites,
- Editing in HTML or using the visual editor (currently Gutenberg), and more.
We have to mention the last and newest WordPress feature – the Gutenberg editor. Gutenberg is a brand new editor for the WordPress content management system. Gutenberg came as part of WordPress 5.0 launched on November 27, 2018. You can read more about it here: Gutenberg (WordPress editor).