Data Sheet:
- Programming language: PHP
- Initial release: 2004
- Open source as of: 2004
- Current major release: 4.9
- Core contributors: 20+
- Languages: 50+
- Total downloads: 670 million +
How do you choose a Content Management System (CMS)?
Don’t ask its biggest fans. Or its biggest foes. Both groups will tell you what they want you to hear. Don’t look at feature lists — at least, not by themselves, and not without understanding what those features will do for your site. And don’t even look at benefits for your site—by themselves.
Start with your goals.
Before choosing any tool, like a CMS, you must understand the goals of the site. What is is supposed to do? And then look at your options in that context.
- Will your ultimate choice start where you are and grow with your organization?
- Will your users be able to get things done simply and securely?
- Will your audience get on board with your mission, collaborate as a community, and help you grow?
WordPress is Popular.
For 29% of sites on the web, WordPress is the CMS of choice.
You’ve probably heard of it. If you are online at all, you’ve definitely used it. And if you need a CMS with an army of support techs, developers and fixers of every sort, ready to help on a minute’s notice and often for free, you’ve found it.
WordPress has a History.
WordPress was born as a blogging platform at the dawn of the social web in 2004. But it soon evolved past that simple use case. As publishing moved online and publications adopted new tools, for many, the tool of choice quickly became WordPress.
Today WordPress is used by 29% of all websites as a content management system, an ecommerce solution, a platform for powering mobile applications, and so much more. It’s community of thousands of contributors have expanded the capabilities and reach far beyond its humble blogging roots. The project continues to thrive and grow year over year, powering many thousands of new projects every year.
WordPress is Extensible.
From a technical perspective, WordPress is based on PHP and uses a relational database, such as MySQL, to store content and configuration. The evolution of the project has seen more and more of the code, being rewritten as JavaScript, leveraging the React library on the back end and jQuery baked in on the front end.
WordPress does a lot, from the very beginning.
It gives you a suite of intuitive tools for working with text, images, audio and video—even if you’ve never published anything online before.
It publishes your work to the web and keeps track of
- Author
- Media
- Revision History
As a publishing tool, you have the choice of when to take your work live — immediately or scheduled for the future. WordPress even allows tiered user roles which allows for collaboration.
Welcome to the ecosystem.
On WordPress, the theme’s design controls the look and feel of the site. Functionality is added with plugins. With the best practice WordPress Developer, design is left to the theme and functionality—which can be as complex as commerce, event booking, reservation systems or as simple as changing the spelling of a single recurring word—with plugins.
You can find free themes and plugins in their respective directories at wordpress.org. These free themes and plugins are reviewed for quality, security, and compatibility with WordPress before they ever go on display.
Need something else? You can find premium themes and plugins for sale on any number of platforms in a thriving, multibillion-dollar ecosystem that spans the world. Along with an army of WordPress professionals on standby, ready to build themes, your plugins — your whole site—just for you.
Build your own.
If you’re willing to learn a little PHP along with some HTML and CSS, you can make styling changes to your theme or build a new one that’s completely yours – or your client’s. With a bit more PHP and some reasonable JavaScript knowledge, you can build plugins.
WordPress is extensible. With actions and filters, WordPress developers can write custom code to accomplish the site’s goals — business and otherwise.
WordPress is a popular, extensible, and well-supported CMS.
Online:
wordpress.org ………. Intentional platform
WordPress.com……….. Hosted weblogs
Chat.wordpress.org….. Community chat
Central.wordcamp.org…. WordCamps worldwide