WordPress is an open source CMS (or content management system which simply means you manage the content yourself) based on PHP and MySql.  Open Source means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it, and it’s free to use for anything you can dream up.

WordPress isn’t the only CMS available, but it is the most popular CMS in the world today.  Almost half of the 60 Million websites powered by WordPress are hosted at www.wordpress.com.  The other half are self-hosted websites, all powered by WordPress.

WordPress Has Exploded

As of 2011, there are nearly 100,00 WordPresses created every day.

Originally a blogging system, WordPress has evolved into a complete website solution.  Today it powers 14% of Alexa’s 1 Million biggest websites according to Buildwith, which when you think about it is rather impressive for what started out as just a simple blogging platform.

The latest version, WordPress 3.2 was released in July of this year.  To date there has been almost 7.5 Million downloads of that version.

Matt Mullenweg & Mike Little were co-founders of the project, and core contributing developers included Ryan Boren, Mark Jaquith, Matt Mullenweg, Andrew Ozz, and Peter Westwood. Today, WordPress’s core software is built by hundreds of volunteers.

WordPress was first released by Matt Mullenweg in May, 2003, starting with version 0.7.  There has been a total of 15 versions of WordPress to this point.

WordPress can be used for almost anything, and is completely customizable.  The only limit to WordPress might just be your imagination and your development skills!