WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
The following is a list of some of the features that come standard with WordPress, however there are literally tens of thousands of plugins that extend what WordPress does, so the actual functionality is nearly limitless. You are also 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.
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.
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.
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:
- Your Site is Your Castle
- Extensive APIs
- Enterprise Ready
- Interoperability
- Trust, but Verify
Not everyone is evil, but keep those who are in check by limiting which html tags are kosher on your weblog.
The Right Tuxedo for Any Content
Your content deserves the best. The site should conform to your content, not the other way around. WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest site to the most complicated portal a piece of cake. Have a new design every day. Your ideas should look as good as what they say.
Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.
Obsessively Organized
It doesn’t matter how much content you have, if your visitors can’t find it. WordPress organizes your content by day, by month, by year, by author, by category — any way you can describe it — and dynamically creates browsable archives so things always stay up to date.
WordPress has killer search baked in. Every word you write is fully searchable through a single box at the top of each page and if your users choose to use an external search engine like Google, rest assured, WordPress will present your content in a way that all but ensures it makes it to the top of the results every time
With built in support for custom post types and custom taxonomies, if you can dream it, WordPress can make it a reality.
Great points, Chris. Looking forward to your next post.
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