WordPress started in 2003 when Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg created a fork of b2/cafelog. The need for an elegant, well-architected personal publishing system was clear even then. Today, WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL, and licensed under the GPLv2. It is also the platform of choice for over 43% of all sites across the web.

The WordPress open source project has evolved in progressive ways over time—supported by skilled, enthusiastic developers, designers, scientists, bloggers, and more. WordPress provides the opportunity for anyone to create and share, from handcrafted personal anecdotes to world-changing movements.

People with a limited tech experience can use it “out of the box”, and more tech-savvy folks can customize it in remarkable ways.

We believe great software should work with minimum set up, emphasizing accessibility, performance, security, and ease of use. The basic WordPress software is simple and predictable, offering powerful features for growth and success.

Supporting the idea of democratizing publishing and the freedoms that come with open source, is a large community of people collaborating on and contributing to this project.

Our contributors’ passion drives the success of WordPress which, in turn, helps you reach your goals. WordPress contributors work around the globe, and have dedicated countless hours to build a tool that offers anyone a voice.

WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPLv2 or later) which provides four core freedoms:

The freedom to study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish.