This is the very basics of WordPress which will let you familiarize with WordPress. Without knowing it properly you can’t expect to get full advantage of this state of the art blog platform.

What is WordPress?
WordPress is a blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License and is available free of charge. That means it’s an open source software which not only let you use it free but also let whatever you wish to do with codes. The latest public version is 2.0.4. Its cross platform CMS software means it is OS independent you can run it in windows, Linux or even in Mac OSX.

In simple word WordPress is a free open source software which allow you to host your own blog easily.

Kinds or Types
There are two kinds of Wordpress available now. One blog or site per installation, but there is a multi-user version available which called WordPress MU. Even with normal WordPress, a user can still have more than one WordPress blog in the same server, even on the same database, by placing the files in different subdirectories.

Our primary discussion will be focused on WordPress traditional/single blog type, since that is the most popular and standard way to start.

• Basic features
• Generates standards-compliant XML, XHTML and CSS
• Integrated link management
• Search engine-friendly permalink structure
• Extensible plugin support
• Nested categories and multiple categories for articles
• TrackBack and Pingback
• Typographic filters for proper formatting and styling of text

Don’t worry if you don’t know/understand yet some of those terms. I will get into those in next session. Bottom-line is WordPress has so many features and opportunity for customization that you can just make almost anything. No other CMS/blog software has yet offered so much vast and powerful CMS software.

Requirements
Well you need to know this first in order to make sure you have ability to use WordPress. Your server must support and have installed PHP 4.2 (or newer) and MySQL (v3.23.x or newer).

Supports
First of all WordPress isn’t a build for business type company, but still it is well documented, has forum support and a massively populated of developer network. You may not find phone support or immediate response, but still it has lot to offer and supports are well enough.

This will be the end of “WordPress Tutorial: Session One”, next session will resume with discussion of features and capabilities.

[tags]bloggism, blogging, weblog, blog platform, weblog software, wordpres, PHP, MySQL:[/tags]