WordPress is one of the most popular open source blogging systems available, with global and vibrant user, developer, and support communities. Though it can be compared to TypePad, Moveable Type, Google’s Blogger, and the Apache Roller project 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).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 base by developers Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress first appeared in 2003, also built on the MySQL open source database for persisting content and PHP as the development platform. Continue reading



