WordPress is a content management system (CMS) or web content publishing system. It is designed to allow content to easily entered and formatted for presentation on a web site. WordPress is popular with non-profit organizations because it has many community building features. WordPress is ideally suited for web publishing of rapidly changing information like newspaper or magazine content. WordPress allows workflows to be setup and has a fine grained permissions system so that publishing tasks can be delegated to different groups.
WordPress is a large PHP program that in our case runs on the Apache2 web server which in turn runs on Linux. WordPress can run on other platforms but this LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP) platform is the most popular. WordPress stores all content in a backend database. WordPress is a mature project in it’s 5th major release. WordPress has many security features built in and an active community that provides security updates on a continuous basis.
WordPress has many optional features that are implemented as modules that can be “plugged” into the web site at will. There is a large community supporting this open source project that maintains these modules. All the activities of the WordPress project are extensively chronicled at the WordPress.org web site. Of course this site is written in WordPress.
