What is WordPress CMS? A Simple Explanation For Beginners. What is the Catch?

What is WordPress CMS?

WordPress is one of the most popular content management and blog publishing applications available on the web today. First released in 2003 by developer Matt Mullenweg as a basic blog engine, WordPress is now a full-featured, fully customizable website creation tool used by millions of individuals, businesses and organizations around the world.

What is WordPress? At its core, WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog. In fact, WordPress powers over 29% of all the websites on the Internet. Yes – more than one in four websites that you visit are likely powered by WordPress.

On a slightly more technical level, WordPress is an open-source content management system licensed under GPLv2, which means that anyone can use or modify the WordPress software for free. A content management system is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website – like content – without needing to know anything about programming. The end result is that WordPress makes building a website accessible to anyone – even people who aren’t developers.

Because it is open source—meaning simply that all of its code and files are free to use, customize, and enhance—WordPress technology has been harnessed by thousands. From curious individuals to freelance professionals to Fortune 500 companies, people all over the world use WordPress because of its many powerful features. These include a templating system, workflow, search-engine friendly link structures, advanced content categorization, and more.

With WordPress, you can create:

  • Business websites
  • eCommerce stores
  • Blogs
  • Portfolios
  • Resumes
  • Forums
  • Social networks
  • Membership sites
  • …pretty much anything else you can dream up.

WordPress started out as a simple way to share your thoughts on the web through, what was then, a new concept, blogging. People wanted to keep “web logs” of their thoughts and have other people read them and contribute comments. So WordPress was born to blog and it still does an outstanding job, but has grown into a content management system (CMS) which is something much more.

WordPress is truly astounding. Whether pushing content to social networks, competing for sales and search engine position, allowing people to subscribe to specific content WordPress is not simply a website, but rather a content-publishing platform. It allows you to take part in today’s “instant” information network – the internet. It gives an individual the same publishing power as a major corporation.

Publishing content isn’t easy. It changes all the time. New content is added, old deleted. In ecommerce, prices change, sales and promotions come and go. Information needs to be very fluid, and WordPress lets you manage this ebb an flow. It also writes rules for you. For example, it will let registered users see a post, but hide it from people who aren’t registered users. But managing the information isn’t it’s only function.

While there may not be a perfect CMS  (Content Management System), WordPress comes pretty close currently to being the best one. At least it is the most popular one by far. Search trends on Google show that there is considerable daylight between WordPress & other CMSes out there. This is, at least, to say that WordPress generates more interest than other platforms.

WordPress is an interface

We use the term interface quite a lot. Originally it was coined to describe a method of passing information between two very different items. Sometimes between two machines (a hardware interface) to let a computer trade information with a printer as an example. A keyboard lets humans talk to computers; it’s also an interface. WordPress is an interface that simplifies the way you communicate with a database. It lets you create and manipulate data with a GUI (Graphic User Interface).

WordPress makes it possible to publish all types of information without knowing how to write code. Anyone can start using a well-setup site without much training. It’s fairly intuitive since it has evolved from years of user feedback and constant revision.

WordPress Is A Rising Star

As more people use a platform, chances are that its following will increase because their interest has been roused. If so many people are choosing WordPress then there must be use value from the CMS. The continued growth of the CMS however can be attributed to the initial inklings that pushed them to use WordPress proving true. The scary or exciting part is that all the points that make WordPress useful are only growing bigger and stronger market-wise. We have seen this in the growth of the WordPress market.

In Conclusion

Are you rallied up already? If you want to build any type of website, from a blog to an eCommerce store, WordPress is a great option. Want to join the ever-growing WordPress community? Getting started with WordPress is as easy as pie.