Blogging with WordPress

As an IT professional, I often get asked, “What is WordPress?” and I find myself struggling to choose the best all-encompassing answer because WordPress means many things to its millions of users around the word - from a free blogging and website building tool to a complex content management tool. Essentially, WordPress is a dynamic content management system (CMS) as well as being a free and open source blogging tool. Based on PHP and MySQL, it is loaded with features like pug-in, widgets and themes that allows easy customization, expandability and flexibility. In fact, it is currently the most widely used CMS on the internet.

Origin and Popularity:

First released in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg, an online social media entrepreneur and web developer based in San Francisco, California, WordPress quickly became the top choice of internet users for blogging and CMS. Its popularity is evident from the fact that over 14% of Alexa Internet’s top one million websites and 22% of all new websites use it for various purposes. WordPress is so widely used that version 3 of the software was downloaded over 65 million times within a year of its release in 2010.

Important Features:

WordPress has a web template system that allows users to change themes, and add pug-ins and widgets of their choice. Themes give the website or blog new look and functionality without altering the content. Plug-in allow users and developers to extending the capabilities of the software. Widgets are small modules that can be dragged and dropped to add functionalities. WordPress is also available for iOS (that runs iPod, iPad and iPhone), Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Android and WebOS. Other great features of WordPress include an integrated link management with a search engine friendly permalink structure; nested articles, automatic filters that provide standardized formatting of text, trackback and pingback standards to display links to other sites.

The Best Blogging Tool:

To millions of internet users, what is WordPress is that it is the best and the most trusted tool for blogging on the internet. Blogging is a sort of online diary where internet users write down their thoughts and activities which are displayed in a chronological order for others to read. In the last ten years, blogging has become one of the most popular ways for people to express themselves. With its many user-friendly features, WordPress is one of the software that has helped make blogging so popular.

WordPress provides a multi-user and multi-blogging environment that allows users to run multiple blogs within one installation. This allows users with their own websites to create and host their own blogging community, and control and moderate the blogs from a single dashboard. As WordPress is the popular blogging tool, every blogger is ensured wide exposure within the WordPress community of millions of internet users.

How to Start Blogging:

Because WordPress is primarily a blogging tool, it has a great blogging platform and it is very easy for beginners to start with. The main registration page is accessible from https://en.wordpress.com/signup/ when the user is required to enter a blog address, which can be anything that the user wishes, along with the password and e-mail address. New users are advised to choose free blogging which offer which doesn’t offer features such as video, custom design and 10 GB space. Free blogging is adequate for most individual bloggers. The paid blogging service, which may cost up to $166 per year, is for professionals and takes blogging to new heights. Once the registration is complete, the user can start blogging right away.

Live Blogging – A great Plug-in

WordPress also offer micro blogging of running events though its live blogging plug-in, which is a plug-in. The plug-in uses WordPress 3.0′s custom post types to create entries in a stripped down version. These micro blogs are then posted along with the blogs. Thus, they allow the user to broadcast details of an ongoing event in real time such as a football tournament or a conference concurrently as the actual blog. The plug-in allows the readers to update what they are viewing instantly, and also add their own comments to the comments posted by others. The plug-in also supports Twitter with the first 139 characters of the user’s live blog being posted to the social media website instantly, once activated. This plug-in in great for professional bloggers it gives them the edge over other bloggers when reporting live events.