INFO: About Wordpress.com

Introducing:

WordPress is a blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. WordPress is the official successor of b2\cafelog, developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg.

The latest release of WordPress is version 2.3.1, released on 26 October 2007. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Features:

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
Static Pages
Multiple Authors
Can store a list of users that visit your blog
Can block a person's IP address
Tag support
History:

b2\cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog was the precursor to WordPress. b2\cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2000 blogs as of May 2003. It was also written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress. Though WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2.

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package was changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress – causing a marked, and continuing, growth in WordPress's popularity
Realease:

WordPress releases are named after well known jazz musicians. WordPress 1.2 was codenamed Mingus (after Charles Mingus).

WordPress 1.5 was released mid-February 2005 and codenamed Strayhorn. It added a range of new vital features. One such is being able to manage static pages. This allows content pages to be created and managed outside the normal blog chronology and has been the first step away from being simple blog management software to becoming a full content management system. Another is the new template/theme system, which allows users to easily activate and deactivate "skins" for their sites. WordPress was also equipped with a new default template (codenamed Kubrick) designed by Michael Heilemann.

WordPress 2.0 was released in December 2005 and codenamed Duke. This version added rich editing, better administration tools, image uploading, faster posting, an improved import system, and completely overhauled the back end. WordPress 2.0 also offered various improvements to plugin developers.

On 22 January 2007, another major upgrade, WordPress 2.1, codenamed Ella, was released. In addition to correcting security issues, version 2.1 featured a redesigned interface and enhanced editing tools (including integrated spell check and auto save), improved content management options, and a variety of code and database optimizations.

WordPress 2.2, codenamed Getz, was released on 16 May 2007. Version 2.2 featured widget support for templates, updated Atom feed support, and speed optimizations. Wordpress 2.2 was initially slated to have a revised taxonomy system for categories, as well as tags, but a proposed revision led to the feature being held back from release.

WordPress 2.3, codenamed Dexter, was released 24 September 2007. Version 2.3 features native tagging support, new taxonomy system for categories, easy notification of updates as well as other interface improvements. 2.3 also fully supports Atom 1.0 along with the publishing protocol. WordPress 2.3 also includes some much needed security fixes.
Vurnerbilities:

BlogSecurity currently maintains a list of WordPress vulnerabilities.

In January 2007, many high profile Search engine optimization (SEO) blogs, as well as many low-profile commercial blogs featuring Adsense were targeted and attacked with a WordPress exploit.

A separate vulnerability on one of the project site's web servers allowed an attacker to introduce exploitable code in the form of a back door to some downloads of WordPress 2.1.1. The 2.1.2 release addressed this issue; an advisory released at the time advised all users to upgrade immediately.

In May 2007, a study revealed that 98% of WordPress blogs being run are exploitable.

In a June 2007 interview, Stefen Esser, the founder of the PHP Security Response Team, spoke critically of WordPress's security track record, citing problems with the application's architecture that make it unnecessarily difficult to write code that is secure against SQL injection vulnerabilities, as well as other problems.

MultyBlogging:

WordPress supports one weblog per installation, though multiple concurrent copies may be run from different directories if configured to use separate database tables.

Wordpress MultiUser is a fork of WordPress created to allow simultaneous blogs to exist within one installation. Wordpress MU makes it possible for any one with a website to host their own blogging community, control and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. Wordpress MU adds a new data table for each blog. Notable communities that use MU are WordPress.com, Edublogs.org and Harvard University.

Lyceum is another enterprise-edition of Wordpress. Lyceum, unlike WordPress MU, stores all of its information in a set number of database tables. Notable communities that use Lyceum are TeachFor.Us (Teach For America teachers' blogs), BodyBlogs and the Hopkins Blogs


Developers:

WordPress development is led by Ryan Boren and Matt Mullenweg. Mullenweg and Mike Little were co-founders of the project.

The contributing developers include:

Dougal Campbell
Mark Jaquith
Donncha O'Caoimh
Andy Skelton
Michel Valdrighi
Peter Westwood
Though developed much by the community surrounding it, WordPress is closely associated with Automattic, where some of WordPress's main contributing developers are employees.

WordPress is also in part developed by its community, among which are the WP testers, a group of people that volunteer time and effort to testing each release. They have early access to nightly builds, Beta versions and Release Candidates. Upgrading to these versions, they can find and report errors to a special mailing list, or the project's Trac tool.

Sponsored Themes:
On 10 July 2007, following a discussion on the WordPress ideas forum and a post by Mark Ghosh in his blog Weblog Tools Collection, Matt Mullenweg announced that the official WordPress theme directory at http://themes.wordpress.net would no longer host themes containing sponsored links. Although this move was criticised by designers and users of sponsored themes, it was applauded by some WordPress users who consider such themes to be spam.

Source: Wikipedia