It was first released on May 27, 2003, by founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of December 2011, version 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times.
Features
WordPress template hierarchy
WordPress has a web template system using a template processor.
Themes
WordPress users may install and switch between themes.
Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress
website or installation without altering the information content or
structure. Themes may be installed using the WordPress "Appearance"
administration tool or theme folders may be uploaded via FTP.
The PHP, HTML & CSS code found in themes can be added or edited for
providing advanced features. Thousands of WordPress themes exist, some
free, and some premium (paid for) templates.
Plugins
One very popular feature of WordPress is its rich plugin architecture
which allows users and developers to extend its abilities beyond the
core installation. WordPress has a database of over 24,000 plugins,
each of which offer custom functions and features enabling users to
tailor their site to their specific needs. These customizations range
from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) enhancers to content displaying features, such as the addition of widgets and navigation bars.
Widgets
Widgets are small modules that offer users drag-and-drop sidebar content placement through the implementation of plugins'
extended abilities. Some of these Widgets offer customization options
such as web forms to fill out, includes or excludes of data and
information such as Categories, Archives and Recent Posts, optional
images though slideshows and/or carousels, amongst other customization
features.These small modules are typically displayed within the header
(header.php), footer (footer.php) and sidebars (sidebar.php files) of
websites, but can also be placed outside of said locations enabling even
further customization.
Multi-user and multi-blogging
Prior to WordPress 3.0, WordPress supported one blog per
installation, although multiple concurrent copies may be run from
different directories if configured to use separate database tables.
WordPress Multi-User (WordPress MU, or WPMU) was a fork of WordPress
created to allow multiple blogs to exist within one installation but is
able to be administered by a centralized maintainer. WordPress MU makes
it possible for those with a website to host their own blogging
community, as well as control and moderate all the blogs from a single
dashboard. WordPress MU adds eight new data tables for each blog.
As of the release of WordPress 3.0, WordPress MU has of since merged with WordPress.
Mobiles
Native applications exist for WebOS, Android, iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. These applications, designed by Automattic
allow a limited set of options, which include adding new blog posts and
pages, commenting, moderating comments, replying to comments in
addition to the ability to view the stats.
Other features of note
WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine–friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; and support for tagging
of posts and articles. Automatic filters are also included, providing
standardized formatting and styling of text in articles (for example,
converting regular quotes to smart quotes). WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article.
History
b2/cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog, was the precursor to WordPress. b2/cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2,000 blogs as of May 2003. It was written in PHP for use with MySQL
by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress.
Although WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.
WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2. Christine Selleck Tremoulet, a friend of Mullenweg, suggested the name WordPress.
In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package were changed by Six Apart and many of its most influential users migrated to WordPress.By October 2009 the 2009 Open Source content management system Market
Share Report reached the conclusion that WordPress enjoyed the greatest
brand strength of any open-source content-management systems.
Awards
In 2007 WordPress won a Packt Open Source CMS Award.
In 2009 WordPress won the Packt best Open Source CMS Awards.
Removal of sponsored themes
On July 10, 2007, following a discussion on the WordPress ideas forum and a post by Mark Ghosh in his blog Weblog Tools Collection, Matt Mullenweg announced that the official WordPress theme directory at http://themes.wordpress.net would no longer host themes containing sponsored links. Although this move was criticized by designers and users of sponsored themes,it was applauded by WordPress users who consider such themes to be spam.
The official WordPress theme directory ceased to accept any new themes,
including those without sponsored links, shortly after the announcement
was made. Sponsored themes are still available elsewhere, as well as
free themes with additional sponsored links added by third parties.
On July 18, 2008, a new theme directory opened on WordPress.org,styled along the same lines as the plug-ins directory.Any theme that is uploaded to it will be vetted, first by an automated program and then by a human.
On December 12, 2008, over 200 themes were removed from the WordPress theme directory as they did not comply with License requirements.
Today, author mentions are permitted in each theme but the official
policy does not allow for sponsorships or links to sites distributing
non-GPL compatible themes. Non-GPL compliant themes are now hosted on other theme directories.
Releases
Main releases of WordPress are codenamed after well-known jazz musicians, starting after version 1.0.
| Legend: | Old version | Current version | Future release |
|---|
Future
After the release of WordPress 3.0, the development team took a
release cycle off from the WordPress software to focus on expanding and
improving the WordPress community.WordPress 3.1 was subsequently released in February, 2011. With version
3.2, released on July 4, 2011, the minimum requirement PHP version and
MySQL were raised as well.
Vulnerabilities
Many security issues were uncovered in the software, particularly in 2007 and 2008. According to Secunia, WordPress in April 2009 had 7 unpatched security advisories (out of 32 total), with a maximum rating of "Less Critical". Secunia maintains an up-to-date list of WordPress vulnerabilities.
In January 2007, many high-profile search engine optimization (SEO) blogs, as well as many low-profile commercial blogs featuring AdSense, were targeted and attacked with a WordPress exploit. A separate vulnerability on one of the project site's web servers allowed an attacker to introduce exploitable code in the form of a back door
to some downloads of WordPress 2.1.1. The 2.1.2 release addressed this
issue; an advisory released at the time advised all users to upgrade
immediately.
In May 2007, a study revealed that 98% of WordPress blogs being run
were exploitable because they were running outdated and unsupported
versions of the software.
In part to mitigate this problem, WordPress made updating the software a
much easier, "one click" automated process in version 2.7 (released in
December 2008).
However, the irregular release cycle means admins still have to be on
their toes, and the filesystem security settings, required to enable the
update process, can be an additional risk.
In a June 2007 interview, Stefan Esser, the founder of the PHP
Security Response Team, spoke critically of WordPress's security track
record, citing problems with the application's architecture that made it
unnecessarily difficult to write code that is secure from SQL injection vulnerabilities, as well as some other problems.
Individual installations of WordPress can be protected with security plugins such as Better WP Security, WP Security Scan and many others.
Users can also protect their WordPress installations by taking steps
such as keeping all WordPress installation, themes, and plugins updated,
using only trusted themes and plugins,
renaming the default admin account, as well as editing the site's
.htaccess file to prevent many types of SQL injection attacks and block
unauthorized access to sensitive files.
Development and support
Key developers
Matt Mullenweg
and Mike Little were cofounders of the project. The core contributing
developers include Ryan Boren, Mark Jaquith, Matt Mullenweg, Andrew Ozz,
Peter Westwood and Andrew Nacin.
WordPress is also developed by its community, including WP testers, a group of volunteers who test each release. They have early access to nightly builds, beta versions and release candidates. Errors are documented in a special mailing list, or the project's Trac tool.
Though largely developed by the community surrounding it, WordPress is closely associated with Automattic,
the company founded by Matt Mullenweg. On September 9, 2010, Automattic
handed the WordPress trademark to the newly created WordPress
Foundation, which is an umbrella organization supporting WordPress.org
(including the software and archives for plugins and themes), bbPress and BuddyPress.
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