WordPress started in 2003 and since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. See Wordpress websites from UiDIGITAL

Everything you get from Wordpress, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means it is royalty free so anyone can take advantage of it’s unique power without paying a license fee.

A Little History of Wordpress

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. WP hope by focusing on user experience and web standards they can continue to create a tool different from anything else out there. See what UiDIGITAL have done using Wordpress >

2005 was a very exciting year for WordPress, as it saw the release of our 1.5 version (introduced themes) which was downloaded over 900,000 times, the start of hosted service WordPress.com to expand WP’s reach, the founding of Automatic by several core members of the WP team, and finally the release of version 2.0.

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Why Wordpress is so Word im-Press-ive!

Excerpts from clintmaher.com.

Manage pages and their content more quickly

This versio of wordpress has really improved the speed and flexibility when managing your site content. The content management side of wordpress now rivals the best (it’s just won the award for best open source content management system).  So for our clients, managing their web sites has become even easier.

Upload New Wordpress Themes From Within The Admin Panel

For many users this will eliminate having to use FTP clients, and by the look of a lot of Wordpress Blogs out there, this is a good thing. As well as being able to upload the themes from within the panel, you can also browse themes and search via keywords, and also apply filters too based on width, colours and columns.

Theme Management Improvements

In previous versions of Wordpress to change a theme, you had to select the theme you wanted, and then either press activate or close after viewing a preview of the theme. Many times this preview would not work due to various issues such as plugins or bad code. Now you get options to activate immediately if you want, and also to delete the theme if you want as well.

Widget Section Overhaul

All sidebars are now visible on the screen, instead of having to select from the drop down box. When you have multiple sidebars this makes a lot of difference as you don’t have to try and remember what goes where. The layout is much cleaner and is a lot easier to use.

Ability To Edit All Plugin Files From Within The Editor

If a plugin has multiple files you can now edit each file individually. Great if a plugin is not working well with the theme that you are using, and if you know a bit of coding, you can tweak it in order to get it to work correctly.

Edit Comments From The Edit Post Section

Now there is the option to see any comments that have already been made below the post box at the bottom. You can do the usual things here such as delete, spam, and reply.

Manage Tags

Version 2.8 brings a completely new option and you can now manage your tags from under the Posts section called  Post Tags.

Dashboard Changes Made Easier

By clicking on the Screen Options tab, you can now change the look of your dashboard a whole lot easier, and can set the number of columns that you want to be shown. Anything from one to four columns is allowed.

Wordpress 2.8 Screen Options

There are a whole stack of other changes and improvements from the previous version, although for most users of Wordpress, these ones will be the most noticeable by far. Wordpress is just getting easier to learn, and easier to use, and that means more and more people will be turning to using wordpress as a Content Management System in the future.