What is WordPress blog software? 

Wordpress is an open source software program designed to create blogs and manage web site contents. Development on WordPress began in 2001. In 2003 it became the official successor to b2/Cafelog. By 2004 many users were moving to WordPress blog software, and it quickly became a very popular blogging software program. Automattic is the company responsible for WordPress, though the WordPress community of followers also contributes a great deal to its development. Matt Mullenweg, Mike Little, and Ryan Boren are key developers of the WordPress project.

WordPress software is used on many types of web sites, from personal blogs to corporate pages. There is also a program called WordPress.com that allows you to quickly set up a free online blog, but it does not give you the same flexibility and control as the WordPress blog software. 

WordPress holds several conferences each year in locations across the world. These conferences are called WordCamps. There is also a large and active online community supporting WordPress. WordPress has been downloaded over 6 million times.

What are the features of WordPress blog software? 

Wordpress offers many features to help you manage your blog or web site. Some of these include:

• W3C compliance so it will work with browsers
• Changes show up immediately
• Static and dynamic page support
• Links for blogrolls
• Many themes - easy to change
• Readers can register and have profiles
• Trackback and pingback
• Comments
• Spam protection
• Workflow for people to add content that must then be edited
• Private and password protected posts
• Typography and automatic text formatting
• Multiple authors
• Trac tool to report errors. WP testers get early access to new releases to test the software and report errors.
• Apps for use with iPhone and iPod Touch
• Lots of plugs-ins are available to customize your web site or blog

What are the pros and cons of WordPress Blog Software?

WordPress is an award winning open source project. It offers templates, themes, and widgets that can be used without a knowledge HTML or PHP, though these languages can be used to further customize WordPress. It offers a lot of online support through its web site and community of followers.

The main complaint about WordPress is that it is known to have security problems that have not yet been patched.

How do I get started with WordPress?

To set up WordPress you will need an account with a web host that offers at least the minimum requirements for WordPress. Those are:

• PHP 4.3+
• MySQL 4.0+
• mod_rewrite Apache module

Apache or Litespeed are the recommended web servers for WordPress.

WordPress has a page listing web hosts who support WordPress. It also offers online documentation to help you get started with WordPress. If you want to start a blog but don't want to download and install WordPress, you can check out WordPress.com.

Visit the WordPress web site at wordpress.org

GoDaddy has some of the best WordPress hosting plans we have seen.