Word on the Street

A Potted History of WordPress – One of the World’s Most popular Blogging Tools.

It’s a fairly common occurrence in the digital world that so-called overnight sensations take years or even decades to reach the public’s collective consciousness. Such is the case with WordPress – a personal publishing tool many people are only hearing about now, even though it was launched in 2003. This open source platform powers tens of millions of websites in more than 50 languages, including tongues as diverse as Vietnamese and Welsh.

In large measure, this global success is due to the fact that WordPress is free. Incredible flexibility as a website publishing toolkit also helps its cause, despite the relative simplicity of a package that the manufacturers claim can be installed within five minutes. However, this formerly-minimal blogging tool has gradually metamorphosed into one of the world’s leading website design and content management platforms. It’s estimated that 60 million websites are underpinned by WordPress and that number is increasing by tens of thousands every day.

WordPress traces its origins back to the forgettably-titled “b2/cafelog”, which was written in PHP as a blog hosting tool. The initial coding was very straightforward and WordPress has remained an open source platform ever since, giving anyone with enough coding knowledge the ability to adapt the software or add their own functionalities to it. Each new release is tested and debugged by willing volunteers before its public launch, and there are thousands of plugins and themes available for free.

It’s important not to confuse the wordpress.com blogging site with the wordpress.org platform server. The former hosts content by writers and bloggers, whereas the latter enables websites of hugely varying complexity and design to be constructed. WordPress.org is home to widgets and plugins that govern everything from social media links through to spam deletion, with over a thousand design themes available for download or customisation.

Today, WordPress is such a phenomenon that conferences are hosted around the world where developers and users can become advocates and devotees. Known as WordCamps, these gatherings provide a forum for discussing new uses for WordPress while enabling people to build on its legendary open-source flexibility. It’s hard to imagine similar gatherings celebrating Excel or Illustrator with equal fervour, which perhaps underscores the significance of WordPress as a platform for establishing and cultivating an online presence.

Installing WordPress software should be fairly straightforward for most people, although it requires a MySQL database to be created with unique login details. Online tutorials guide beginners through each installation stage, and the WordPress forums are packed with oracles who are happy to answer the most basic or challenging of queries. It’s a good idea to start by choosing a pre-existing design template while establishing the basics of any new website; further personalisation can take place once key pages and links have been created. Perhaps the greatest merit of WordPress is that it’s constantly evolving – which means individual websites can do the same…

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