WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. It is most associated with blogging but supports other types of web content including more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, and online stores.
As a CMS, WordPress allows you to control and manage content of your website with a very easy system such as the WordPress dashboard panel. A dashboard lets you to do work on your website without needing to program anything. You can add or delete images and edit text on your webpage fast and easily.
WordPress powers over 30% of all websites and is by far the most used CMS on the planet. Backed by a huge community, this open-source platform powers a multi-billion dollar economy with themes/plugins and custom software.
Easy to use, Wordpress offers an easy solution for both developers and non-developers.
### From Blogging Platform to CMS
The power of WordPress becomes apparent in the use of 3 features: custom post types, custom taxonomies, and custom fields. Generating custom post types allows a website administrator or web developer to separate very specific content types from the rest of their website content. This can be helpful on websites with large page counts and numerous varying content sections.
For example: lets say you have a company website with a large number of products, numerous physical storefront locations, and a news/blog section. If all of that content was all crammed into the default posts or pages section of the website admin panel, navigating said sections could very quickly become an overwhelming mess.
In this instance, you could create a custom post type for products, a custom post type for locations, keep thing the default posts section exclusively for your news/blog content.
Note: WordPress's ease of use may encourage new users to forget about website security. However, the popularity of WordPress increases the activity of malware and other issues.
It is important to choose extremely difficult or random passwords for the administrators and for the database. This guards against random brute-force attacks.
Using tools such as [Jetpack](https://jetpack.com/) and an [SSL certificate](https://www.verisign.com/en_US/website-presence/website-optimization/ssl-certificates/index.xhtml) increases your protection against unwanted attacks.
