A Quick Run Down on WordPress Features

Posted in Featured Article on Nov 20th, 2010 |

If you are not aware of WordPress, and have never heard the name in your life ever before and want to know something about it, then do not worry as you have come to the right place. Go through the rest of this write-up and you will by the end of it realize that WordPress is not completely alien topic anymore, you will have the basics.

Introducing WordPress

WordPress (http://WordPress.org/) is simple a software tool which people make use of for online publishing. The reason why it is so popular is because it is easy to use, very fast and user-friendly. WordPress might be considered as new or recent software but its foundations were laid way back in the year 2001.

WordPress is very mature and stable in its functions and if made use of properly, can be a great boon for its users.

WordPress Features Guides

WordPress is a free, open source publishing platform, with rigid standards for usage, very fast and stable. Entirely user friendly, and fully scalable.

Platform and License

The WordPress software is licensed under GPL and makes use of the recent PHP and MySQL platforms.

Installation

WordPress can be installed on any shared hosting account or your own server, as long as you have access to PHO and MySQL. It gives you total freedom and control over your weblog and anything relating to your weblog and can be easily modified.

UTC friendly

WordPress is UTC (Universal Coordinated Time) friendly and there are no confusions as far as time management is concerned as it follows the GMT values which are universally accepted.

Syndication

One can make use of RSS feeds for syndicating content, as they are compatible with WordPress. Each and every page on the weblog would be part of an RSS feed which the readers can subscribe to. This means that there would be feeds for all the latest posts, categories, comments, etc. These feeds make it easier to publicize your weblog and make it known in the virtual world. Clean URLs are imperative if one wants to make use of SEO and this is facilitated by WordPress. One can even keep in touch with other blogs as WordPress is ready with Pingback and Trackback services as well.

Design customization

Template driven design, file editor, template tags, themes and plugins are all part of the WordPress script. The templates are used for determining the design of the pages generated. If you are not happy with the template and want to make some changes, then you can make use of the editor tools provided. One can choose from a variety of themes and if you are not happy with the available themes, then you can have one customized easily. Plugins are there for extending the core functionality of the weblog. There are a huge number of plugins available.

Content creation

As far as content creation is concerned, there are a variety of tools available namely password protection, post slug, posting in the future, multi-paged posts, file and picture uploading, emoticons, drafts, posts previewing, email blogging, sidebar, formatting, etc.

Other features

Archiving, searching, community building, HTML tags, moderation, notification, Blogroll, Bookmarklet, Categorizing, Importing, Exporting, Displaying, etc. are some of the other tools and features available with WordPress.

(Further: Also check out our related hosting guides at Best WordPress Hosting.)