WordPress

Introduction

WordPress is an OpenSource blogging platform written in PHP. When WordPress was first released, it took off quickly, as there was a big demand for a free and powerful publishing system. Other blogging platforms at that time either came with expensive license fees or were not as powerful. Much of the success of WordPress might be due to it's simple installation and an abundance of themes and plugins, which offer almost limitless customisation of the basic system. For those that want to use WordPress, but can't host the blog software themselves, there is also a hosted service at http://wordpress.com/ that allows everyone to have a free WordPress blog.

Download and installation

The WordPress software can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/. It requires a web hosting with PHP version 4.3 or greater and MySQL version 4.0 or greater. To install WordPress, you basically need to upload the WordPress scripts to your hosting and then call the URL to the site. The famous five minute  install  then lets  you answer  some  questions about the database and basic  information of the blog. After that, database tables are created by the blog software and the site is basically ready to run.

Themes

WordPress Themes are bundles of PHP, CSS and Image files, that define the look and feel of a WordPress installation. There are literally thousands of themes all over the web. Recently, WordPress producer Automattic opened an official theme directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/, but so far only a few themes can be found there.  Smashing Magazine recently published a  List of 100 great WordPress themes that might be worth looking into.

Plugins

WordPress has built in mechanics for extending the core software's capabilities with Plugins. These are extensions that can practically be developed by anyone. There are plugins for spam protection, database management, enhanced comment functionality, SEO and virtually anything one might want a blog platform to do. Many of these plugins can be found at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

WordPress Alternatives

While WordPress is a great blogging software, there are other great products as well. Serendipity and Textpattern are great blog systems. If you are looking for something that is more geared towards a community oriented CMS, Drupal might be the way to go.