WordPress is a free and open-source content management system based on **PHP** and **MySQL**. Features include robust user management, an extensible theming and plugin architecture, and a flexible template system. It is most associated with blogging but supports other types of web content including forums, media galleries, and online stores.
WordPress was first launched in 2003 and now powers over 30% of all websites. It is by far the most used CMS on the planet. Backed by a huge community, this open source platform powers not only countless sites but a multi-billion dollar economy with themes, plugins, and custom software.
Blogging is a foundational feature of WordPress. One of the primary things it allows you to do is create individual "posts", and designate a main blog page that displays them in chronological order.
It supports many useful publishing features out of the box, like the ability to add images, save drafts, enable comments, and organize your posts with tags and categories. And it includes an admin dashboard for managing posts, media, site menus, settings, and more.
### WordPress as CMS
In addition to posts, WordPress also comes with the ability to create "pages" — any non-chronological page on your site, like an "About" or "Contact" page.
What makes WordPress particularly powerful is that it's possible to create other custom page types as well. You could, for example, create your own classifieds site with a "listings" page type, or a book review site with a "review" page type, and even assign custom data fields and taxonomies to these as well. Using a combination of plugins and custom coding, you can adopt WordPress as a content management system for all kinds of uses.
WordPress does not require work from scratch. For ease of new developers there are tons of free templates available on internet which can be used by basic developer.
Few websites which provides these free templates are:
WordPress has a few great ways to extend its core functionality. Among these, the main buckets are themes and plugins.
Themes typically provide an overall framework for the design and functionality of a site. WordPress has many free themes available, and there's a large ecosystem of professional-grade themes available at reasonable prices.
Plugins extend WordPress functionality in specific ways, adding features like mailing list integrations, contact forms, enhanced security, or custom data fields. As with themes, there's a huge number of plugins available, many of them free, or with both free and pro versions available, covering almost any feature you might think of.
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.
The free and open-source version of wordpress is found at [https://wordpress.org](https://wordpress.org) and must be self-hosted on a server or local development machine. This is also the version of WordPress that is frequently available as a simple installation through cPanel on the majority of hosting providers. Meanwhile, a hosted version of WordPress is available [wordpress.com](https://wordpress.com), but this is not an open-source version. Users of the WordPress.com site may need to pay subscription fees to access many of the features and benefits of the open-source WordPress.
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.
