The Open Learning Centre

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Or to put it another way, WordPress is "the" blogging platform.

It is used mainly to create blogs (Web Logs) which are usually on-line diaries, commentary and news sites created by individuals or small groups. WordPress can be considered a CMS (Content Management System) too, although it is somewhat narrower in scope than other CMS such as Joomla! and Drupal.

One of the key features that make Joomla! and WordPress so popular in comparison to similar products is the huge library of freely available plugins. Plugins and extensions are used to add extra features and functionality so you can tailor your system to meet your needs. Being Open Source also means that anyone is free to contribute by creating new plugins or enhancing existing ones.

Written in the same programming language as Joomla!, PHP, WordPress also uses the MySQL open source database to manage and store all content. Our blog, The Open Sourcerer, runs on WordPress software.