Getting into WordPress

WordPress is an open source blog engine. Open source means that nobody owns it, everybody works on it, and anyone can contribute to it. Blog engine means a software application that can run a blog. It's a piece of software that lives on the web server and makes it easy for you to add and edit posts, themes, comments, and all of your other content. More expansively, WordPress can be called a publishing platform because it is by no means restricted to blogging.

In fact, a number of big (by today's standards) online agencies use WordPress to run their sites. Outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Reuters all use WordPress as the base of their web publishing platforms.

Originally, WordPress was a fork of an older piece of software named b2/cafelog. WordPress was developed by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, but is now maintained and developed by a team of developers that includes Mullenweg.

Over the years, the platform has evolved a lot and, even though a massive amount of new functionality got introduced, WordPress still remains one of the easiest to use web publishing platforms out there.

Using it for a blog or website

There are generally two popular types of websites for which WordPress is meant to be used:

• Normal websites with relatively static content—pages, subpages, and so on
• Blog websites—chronologically organized, frequently updated, categorized, tagged, and archived.

However, as experience shows, these days WordPress is successfully used to run a wide variety of other sites as well, such as

• Corporate business websites
• E-commerce stores
• Membership sites
• Video blogs
• Photo blogs
• Product websites, and more

For those of you unfamiliar with blog websites and blogging terminology, let's take a look at the basics.

Starting your journey, what is a blog? A blog is a website that usually contains regular entries such as a kind of log. These entries can be of various types, such as commentary, descriptions of events, photos, videos, personal remarks, tutorials, case studies, long opinion pieces, or political ideas. They are usually displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent additions on the top. These entries can be organized in a variety of ways—by date, by topic, by subject, and so on.

One of the main characteristics of a blog is that it's meant to be updated regularly. Unlike a site where the content is static, a blog behaves more like an online diary, wherein the blogger posts regular updates. Hence, blogs are dynamic with ever-changing content. A blog can be updated with new content and the old content can be changed or deleted at any time (although deleting content is not a common practice).

Most blogs focus their content on a particular subject—for example, current events, hobbies, niche topics, technical expertise—or else they are more like personal online diaries.

Originally, a blog was short for weblog. According to Wikipedia, the term weblog was first used in 1997, and people started using blogs globally in 1999. The terms weblog, weblogging, and weblogger were added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2003, though these days most people leave off the "we" part.