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WordPress is one of the most popular open source content management systems available, with global and vibrant user, developer, and support communities. While it can be compared to Drupal and Joomla as a user-generated content workhorse, WordPress distinguishes itself with a broad array of hosting options, functional extensions (plugins), and aesthetic designs and elements (themes).

With the rise of self-publishing, low-cost web hosting, and freely available core components such as the MySQL database, blogging software followed the same trend as most other digital technologies, moving from high-end, high-cost products to widely available, low-cost consumer or “hobbyist” systems. WordPress isn’t simply about creating a blog so that you can have a digital diary attached to your vanity URL; it has evolved into a full-fledged content management system and burgeoning application development framework used by individuals and enterprises alike. This section takes a brief tour through the early history of WordPress and brings you up to speed on the current release and user community.

WordPress started similarly to many other popular open source software packages: Some talented developers saw a need to create a powerful, simple tool based on an existing project licensed under the GPL. Michel Valdrighi’s b2/cafelog system provided the starting point, and WordPress was built as a fork of that code base by developers Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress first appeared in 2003 and was also built on the MySQL open source database for persisting content with PHP as the development platform. Valdrighi remains a contributor to the project, which is thriving as it has a growing and interested community of users and developers.

As with other systems written in PHP, it is self-contained in the sense that installation, configuration, operation, and administration tasks are all contained in PHP modules. WordPress’s popularity has been driven in part by its simplicity, with the phrase “five-minute installation” making appearances in nearly every description or book about WordPress. Beyond getting to a first post, WordPress was designed to be extended and adaptable to the different needs of different people.

WordPress today is supported by a handful of core developers and many key contributors. Mike Little runs the WordPress specialty shop zed1.com and he contributes the occasional patch to the code. Matt Mullenweg’s company, Automattic, continues to operate the wordpress.com hosting service as well as fund development of related content and site management tools, including Akismet, multi-site WordPress, Gravatar, and most recently plugins such as JetPack. Akismet is a robust, Automattic-hosted spam detection and protection service with a statistically (and incredibly) low failure-to-detect rate. Previously known as WordPress MU, multi-site WordPress functions are at the heart of the wordpress.com hosting system and are now merged into the main WordPress source tree. Gravatar dynamically serves images tied to e-mail addresses, providing a hosted icon with a variety of display options. Think of it as a service to make hot-linking your profile picture technically and socially acceptable. JetPack is a multifunction plugin offering a vast array of common needs for the website owner. The JetPack plugin is covered further in Chapter 16.

As a content management system, the WordPress system definition does not stop at time-serialized posts with comments. BuddyPress is a set of themes and plugins that extends WordPress into a functional social networking platform, allowing registered users to message and interact with each other, again with all content managed within the WordPress framework. Similarly, bbPress is a PHP- and MySQL-based system designed for forums (bulletin boards) that is distinct from WordPress but is commonly integrated with it.

Chapter 16 covers some of the WordPress adjunct systems in more detail, but they are included here to provide a sense of how WordPress has expanded beyond a basic single-user–oriented tool. At the same time, we are not endorsing or making a commercial for Automattic, but delving into the guts of WordPress without a spin of the propeller hat toward Mullenweg and Little is somewhere between incorrigible and bad community behavior.