WordPress comes with a great set of features designed to make your publish experience on the web as appealing, easy and pleasant as possible. WordPress offers you fast, freely distributed, light, free, standards-compliant, semantic and powerful publishing platform, with a great number of default features and settings, and an highly configurable core.
The article describes a list of some standard WordPress features. In addition, the variety of plugins can expand the default WordPress`s functionality. Thus, its actual functionality has almost no limits. Also you can extend or modify the WordPress code in any way or use it for your business without any license or payment. That is the meaning of free software. The freedom to have complete control over it.
Almost a quarter of today`s new sites are powered by WordPress. It is trusted by content publishers both small and large including NY Times and CNN since WordPress is the content management system (CMS) of choice for majority of the top million sites. This makes it the most popular on the Internet. You know you are getting the best software for the job since it has eight years of proven history and more than 50 million sites worldwide.
WordPress has both the intuitiveness of an iPhone and the power of Microsoft Word. There is a quite simple interface at the core of WordPress. It is a similar to the desktop publishing software. Often all you have to do is to type your site’s URL and log in. No expert knowledge or coding experience required. Actually, most people pick up the basics without any special training. Interface is easy to use and contains no superfluous details. It is the result of years of refinement.
With WordPress you can easily share content and attract readers to your site since WordPress is not simply a website, but rather a content-publishing platform. It ensures that your site is provided in the proper format to appear at the top of search engines the moment you click publish, pushes content to social networks or provides visitors the ability to subscribe to specific content they are interested in. They can do it in their favorite feed reader or via e-mail. So you have a powerful megaphone to broadcast your message to the world with one single click.
A vibrant community of users supports WordPress 24/7. Those people have already solved many of the toughest problems to sharing information today and they’ll be glad to help you. More than 10 million users have downloaded the latest version of WordPress since it was released several months ago, and the prior version was downloaded by more than 6 million of people. The WordPress community is an ecosystem built around the platform’s viability and proven success It has a library of more than 20 thousand of open-source, free themes and plugins as well as hundreds of core contributors each release cycle. And this number grows every day.
From now on, there is no need for expensive desktop software or back-and-forth e-mails. WordPress can become your entire workflow from the rough draft to the time you click publish – spelling, collaboration, review and grammar.
Everything that can make sites look rich – videos, pictures, documents and music, – is provided in WordPress. There is a media browser to help you find, store and organize the files you are looking for and a comfortable drag-and-drop file uploader that uploads your files to the web page with minimum efforts. In addition, WordPress can host the files that make your pages popular.
We have enough distractions between IMs, E-Mail, Tweets, Status Updates and Texts as it is today. And it is not necessary for your publishing platform to be one of them. When you are writing WordPress lets you concentrate only on your ideas and literally fades away. Nothing will distract you from your writing.
When you type a text, you don’t have to worry about crash of your PC since WordPress automatically saves all your work. Want to return to a previous version? It is easy. Each time you click save, WordPress creates a snapshot that can be restored with one single click.
Okay, maybe it is not not quite as it sounds. WordPress lets you backdate a post for some time in the past or lets you schedule posts for some time in the future so that you can prepare them when it is more comfortable for you.
The web is everywhere as well as your workflow. WordPress has mobile applications for iOS, Android, Nokia, Blackberry, WebOS and Windows Phone 7. You can control your site wherever you are. Your phone not listed? Not a problem. WordPress provides a possibility to create post to your site via e-mail.
To hide your posts from the public, you can give passwords to them. Moreover, you can also create private posts which are visible only by their author.
If you have too long post, you can divide them into several pages. It is much comfortable so your readers will not have to scroll to the end of the world.
Save your rough drafts, edit them in some time and publish when you’re finished.
To check if everything is okay, you can see the live preview of the article you just finished before publishing. Generally, you can see it any time you want.
The site should conform to your content since your content deserves the best. Not the other way around. WordPress provides a full theme system which is aimed to simplify the creation of everything from the simplest page to the most complicated website. See the new design every day. Your design should be as great as your ideas.
No matter how well your content is, if the site visitors cannot find it. WordPress dynamically creates browsable archives and organizes your content by author, by category, by day, by month, by year — anyway you need. So your content will always stay up to date.
WordPress has build-in extremely powerful search. Any word you type is fully searchable using a search box at the top of each page. If you prefer to use an external search engine like Google, WordPress will ensure your content to be always at the top of the search results.
Look up to the URL bar of any site? Do you see those letters and number gobbledygook? WordPress comes with beautiful URLs it since websites are built for people, not robots. Every URL describes what your content says and is intuitively written for humans.
Publishing the internet can be a difficult if you have no right tools. For seamless web production, WordPress silently type sets every letter when you click publish. To intelligently convert web-unfriendly characters like apostrophes, quotes, em and en dashes, ellipses, ampersands and multiplication symbols into typographically correct HTML entities, WordPress uses the Texturize engine, while many other CMSs let the details fall by the wayside.
You can create a site that is delivered in a language of your choice and localized to your choice since WordPress has been translated to more than 60 different languages. So when you say “publish”, you will be understood. To localize and translate WordPress to the fullest extent, the gettext method is used.
Are you a rookie in computer science? WordPress requires no degree. Most details which you see on each page from the dynamic functionality to menus can be fully customized with the help of drag-and-drop controls on the back end.
Do you have a lot of users? It is not a problem. Similarly to real life, WordPress lets you lets you assign privileges for different users and define different roles accordingly. If you want, users can have the ability to register themselves, and then submit content for your review.
Often to adapt the software for your unique use a little configuration is needed. So WordPress provides an extensive out-of-the-box functionality. To hunt down, configure and install a long-list of add-ons, many other CMSs rely on you and WordPress considers core (revisions, comments, RSS feeds, etc.) just to get many of the features. To undertake significant coding efforts to provide the needed functionality, it relies on developers. WordPress provides the heavy lifting instead of you. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel since you already have the best wheel in the world.
WordPress comes with the source code released to the world to improve, take apart and build upon. It was built by a dedicated community of professional enthusiasts, academics and developers. It’s hallmark requires no licensing fees or direct costs, it is constantly up-to-date software with a rapid development cycle and frequent updates. Moreover, international support crew provides professional help wherever you are.
Unlike WordPress, number of publishing platforms lock their users in with limited data formats. To allow you to take your data with you, WordPress comes with tools to seamlessly import from many popular sources. It always relies on open standards. You should be able to do what you want with your data since it is belong to you. At the moment we have importers for Textpattern, b2, Greymatter, Movable Type and Blogger and we are working on importers for pMachine and Nucleus.
You have complete control over WordPress since it is designed to be installed in a shared hosting account, on your own web server or in the cloud. Unlike third-party hosted services or commercial software, you are able to access and change everything on your site. You can install WordPress both on a corporate intranet or on your personal computer.
WordPress comes with multi-site technology. This technology helps to power over twenty million sites on WordPress.com as well as the New York Times and CNN. Multi-site technology has no any security concerns and allows users to have full administrative control over their sites. Each site can manage its own users and have its own functionality (plugins) and its own look (themes). However, at the same time, security updates and network-wide policies can be deployed in one click.
Each time you update your site, all pages are generated using the templates and the database. The same applies each time when a page from your site is requested by a visitor. No more rebuilding of all your pages when requesting in any aspect of it. This means that the process requires minimum server storage space and makes updating the design of your site as fast as possible.
Templates are used in WordPress to generate the pages dynamically. By editing the templates with the help of your favorite IDE, text-editor or even the built-in Template Editor tool, you can control the presentation of content. It is much easier to design the content and information displayed on your site using template tags. To make your site match your vision you don’t have to be a PHP specialist.
More than eight years of history powering secure, stable websites. It is about WordPress. Because of the dedicated open-source community and wide user-base, any vulnerabilities are discovered quickly. The dedicated security team develop Patches rapidly and they are released in a little time since they are reported. All patches are deployed in one click since WordPress have integrated core-update system. WordPress never stores passwords in an unencrypted format. It restricts URL access and sanitizes all user input using an extensive user permissioning system. By the time new versions are released, stakeholders can be absolutely confident in their stability since WordPress uses intensive beta test technology.
WordPress consequently allows developers to effectively and quickly customize the application to their unique needs by relying on its own extensive API interface (also known as dogfooding interface). With the help of user-generated filters and hooks, many aspects of the essential WordPress experience can be modified or overridden. These APIs are necessary in a rich environments since they help WordPress to integrate seamlessly with existing systems.
There are high chances that any challenge the organization faces has already been tackled and someone else provided the free code. WordPress among other enterprise-centric features has provides support for user management, Active Directory authentication, scheduled backups and workflow integration. It is fully adapted to countless enterprise environments.
WordPress has the ability to connect with another system? It uses an open XML standard XML-RPC that allows connection of different systems in different environments. XML-RPC allows complex tasks to be performed being at the same time as simple as possible. WordPress also supports he MovableType API, MetaWeblog API and an extended version of the Blogger API. Moreover, you can use clients like Zempt which are designed for other platforms.
There is nothing easier than to upgrade or install WordPress. Try it and you will wonder why the rest of software is not this easy. WordPress’s famous one click updates and five minute install is the envy of the industry. With WordPress you will know you are always using the best software.
It is better to check html tags which are used on your weblog. In WordPress html tags allowed by default setup without compromising the safety of your server or data to let people use them in their posts and comments.
The WordPress team is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C and has done a great job to ensure every bit of WordPress generated code. This is important not only for for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation but also for interoperability with today’s browsers. You should demand nothing less since your website is a beautiful thing.
To say WordPress is only a blogging platform is like saying Microsoft is only a Windows manufacturer. Anyone who says WordPress is only a blogging platform just haven’t heard about the rapid growth of CMS over the past couple years. Generally, WordPress was not even used as a blog the majority of the time. WordPress is a great platform having custom taxonomies and built in support for custom post types.
WordPress fully supports ATOM, RSS 1.0 (aka RDF) and RSS 2.0 specifications, and that is not all. There is a feed for the comments, the latest posts, categories and as it were said earlier, for anything you want. Any page on your site has an associated feed that your readers can subscribe to. It become easier for you to spread your ideas around the world and your readers get more options to keep track of different sections on your site,. WordPress also allows adding mp3 files (such as podcasts) to your RSS feeds since it supports RSS 2.0 with enclosures.
WordPress comes ready for TrackBack and PingBack in an increasingly connected world. Those two very useful ways of connection to other sites. In addition, WordPress means maximum exposure for your site to search engines since it supports pinging Ping-O-Matic.
Through the use of pingbacks, trackbacks and comments, WordPress helps to build communities around sites. Despite the fact that WordPress is not the YMCA, it helps you fostering friendship and keep in touch with the audience.
Through Trackback or Pingback visitors can comment on their own site as well as to leave comments on individual entries of your site. Comments on a per-post basis can be disabled or enabled.
To manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, WordPress uses very robust tools such as open proxy checker and an integrated blacklist as well as a rich variety of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
WordPress can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog thanks to a built-in user registration system. There are also plugins that hide posts from users with low level as well as you can optionally close comments for users who have no registration.
In WordPress html tags allowed by default setup without compromising the safety of your server or data to let people use them in their posts and comments. However, it is better to check html tags which are used on your weblog.
WordPress comes with a variety of moderation options. You can change
- comments with specific words in them
- all comments before their appearance on the blog
- comments which contain more than some specified number of links
- comments from specific IP addresses
All these options keep vandals and spammers in check.
WordPress can send you an email each time there is a comment awaiting moderation or a new comment. It ensures you to be always in the loop.
The development of WordPress is ruled by a number of unwavering principles. They are:
- The WordPress Bill of Rights
- Design for the Majority
- Work Out of the Box
- Clean, Lean, and Mean
- Options not Decision
- Arbitrary are not Deadlines
- Strive for Simplicity
- Be Mindful of the Vocal Minority
WordPress guarantees users several freedoms since it is licensed under the GPLv2 or later. They are:
- The freedom change the program to make it do what you wish as well as to study how it works
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
- The freedom to distribution of copies of your modified versions to others.
- The freedom to redistribution.
- MySQL (5.0.2 or newer) and PHP (5.2.4 or newer) are required.
To summarize, WordPress is a great publishing software which focuses on great user experience, speed and ease to use. WordPress is a tool for active people, who know what they need from life.