What is WordPress?

Did you know that WordPress is the most popular Content Management System on the web? 15% of all sites online use it to serve up content to their users.

The WordPress.com service recieves 131 million unique visitors a month.WordPress is a Content Management System that uses PHP to connect to a MySQL database and retrieve & edit the contents of it.

Basically it's ready-made a piece of free software that makes doing a complicated task (creating, editing and retrieving database entries) much more user friendly by offering a GUI for working with it.

The benefits of using a CMS over standard html files are many, the main one is the ability for users to create content without the need to know html or css code, in fact you don't need to know any code at all! There's even more reasons as well.

• A CMS is dynamic by nature. If you make an edit somewhere then it will also change everywhere else it appears on your site - if you update a post then it will change everywhere it shows up or if you change your header image then it will change on all the pages. No need to edit all the pages individually.
• A CMS will have a community. That user-base can help with any problems you come across as well as create extensions to the system, which leads me to the next point.
• CMSs are extendable. Through plugins and themes you can make things look and work just how you need them to.

The WordPress community is hugely active and solving problems all the time. There's also a huge official plugin and theme directory hosted on WordPress.org.

WordPress started just as a blog.

WordPress was originally intended to be used purely as a blogging platform to enable people to easily share their thoughts with the online world. You would write your post, click publish and it would appear on your site in a list with the rest of your posts. That is still how many online publications work, however normally a publication will refer to them as articles instead of posts. Since then it's been extended & improved and it's changed into something bigger - It's now a fully fledged Content Management System.

10 years ago (almost to the day) when WordPress was released blogs were for a different purpose than they are now. They were essentially a diary for you to jot down whatever you wanted to share. Now there are plenty of ways to keep a diary, you could even keep a diary through Twitter if you wanted, and WordPress now gets used for such a variety of site types.

Now WordPress is a CMS

The possibilities of what you can do with WordPress are endless. Through the use of plugins you can add any functionality you like and through themes you can change the look of your whole site in seconds. I shared 3 ways to use WordPress as a service (other than for blogging) with you a few months ago.

There's a complete plugin and theme API in the WP Core so you can make things work and look exactly how you want. That has been important for the continued development of WordPress and new themes and plugins are submitted every day to the WordPress.org repo.

The company behind WordPress.com, Automattic, are hard at work creating some amazing plugins - like Akismet and Jetpack.

So What Is WordPress?

WordPress is an open source content management system built with php. It connects to mysql databases to store and retrieve website content and places your content within theme files to output to your visitors. It's a ready made website in a box for you to deploy and use however you want

William is a freelance WordPress developer who's been working with WordPress since version 1. He builds responsive websites using WordPress for dozens of differnt website types and uses.