WordPress is a full-featured CMS that is the world’s most popular tool for building websites. In fact, it is so popular that over 40% of all websites are built with WordPress. The reasons for that widespread popularity require a little more explanation.
CMS is nothing but a system to manage the content created in any way. For more information about CMS read this article.
So in general WordPress is used to manage your content, organize it and make it beautiful and effective. The Blogger is used to create and organize its content, WordPress is also used in the same way, the only difference is that Blogger is tagged with Google because it is a CMS operated by Google, Whereas WordPress is a free-running CMS.
History of WordPress
Matt Mullenweg, then an 18-year-old university student, decided in January 2003 to take a chunk of source code from the B2/Cafelog project to develop his blogging platform. He wanted a solution that was the best of the options. He posted his desire to create this miracle platform on his blog.
Mike Little, (now the owner of the Z1), responded to the post and together they developed the modified version into a usable platform. It grew quickly, especially when Michelle Valdrigi took an interest in the project.
Now between those three, WordPress was officially born, the first version of which was released in May 2003.
The basic version is just a framework for the current – WordPress training. Their goal was to create a platform that made it quick and easy for writers to publish their ideas online. Earlier, it was just a simple blogging tool and not a full CMS. So in this era, you need to have some understanding of coding to do blogging.
SEO-friendly WordPress was started in 2004 which we all know today.
This change, together with competitors starting to charge for their service, prompted thousands to switch to the new, but a growing platform. Within a year, the WordPress software was downloaded more than 900,000 times. This growth was in part due to a number of new features the team was adding.
WordPress started promoting themes and plugins in 2005. These helped users create more aesthetically pleasing blogs. Several new capabilities and functions were also added, such as persistent caching for faster sites, creation of user roles, and a completely new UI for the backend. The new UI eventually led to the use of WordPress as a powerful CMS.
Version 2.1, released in 2007, gave users spell checking, tagging, and auto-save.
As of 2009, the software was optimized with automatic upgrades, simple plug-in installation, comment threading, and a brand new API.
Between 2010 and today, WordPress has continued to undergo many changes. While their original intention is still clear, bloggers now have more tools available to them. Image editing, custom posts, new APIs, speed improvements, security features, etc. updated over time.
How WordPress Works
WordPress is actually a tool called a Content Management System (CMS), you can think of it as an operating system for your website. When you use WordPress, you are free to use any of the thousands of plugins and themes built for WordPress.
The WordPress system runs on a web server (your web hosting account). You access WordPress from a computer or mobile device with a standard web browser. You can easily learn about it and its features by joining a WordPress course. Because WordPress is hard work, you don’t need any special software to build and manage your WordPress website.
Under the hood, WordPress uses a database server (MySQL) to store its content and site settings, and a web server (typically Nginx or Apache) to deliver your web pages to your site visitors. The core WordPress application is programmed in both PHP and JavaScript.
But don’t be intimidated by these technical details. You don’t need to know a single thing about these related technologies to use WordPress. WordPress never expects you to know any more about things like SQL.
