WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used for basic content management.
It has many features including a user-friendly workflow, a rich plugin architecture, and an advanced templating system.
It was first released in May 2003 by Matt Mullenweg as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of September 2009, it is being used by 202 million websites worldwide.
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. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of Mullenweg.
In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package were changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress – causing a marked and continuing growth in WordPress’s popularity.
By October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report reached the conclusion that WordPress enjoys the greatest brand strength of any open source content management systems.
That conclusion was based on an extensive analysis of rate of adoption patterns and brand strength and was backed by a survey of users.
Awards
In 2007 WordPress won a Packt Open Source CMS Award.
In 2009 WordPress won the best Open Source CMS Award.
