Full standards compliance WordPress has gone to great lengths to
make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with
the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability
with today's browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the
next generation.
No rebuilding Changes you make to your templates or entries are
reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
WordPress Pages Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily,
so for example you could have a static "About" page that you manage through
WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site
could be run off WordPress alone. (We don't for technical mirroring reasons.)
WordPress Links Links allows you to create, maintain, and update
any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much
faster than calling an external blogroll manager.
WordPress Themes WordPress comes with a full theme system which
makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated
webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally
different looks that you switch with a single click.
Cross-blog communication tools WordPress fully supports both the
Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future
standards as they develop.
Comments Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual
entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site.
You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.
Spam protection Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust
tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and
eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of
plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
Full user registration WordPress has a built-in user registration
system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles
and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close
comments for non-registered users.
Password Protected Posts You can give passwords to individual
posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which
are viewable only by their author.
Easy installation and upgrades Installing WordPress and upgrading
from previous versions and other software is a piece of cake. Try it and
you'll wonder why all web software isn't this easy.
Easy Importing WordPress currently has importers for Movable Type,
Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and
pMachine are under way.
XML-RPC interface WordPress currently supports an extended version
of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can
even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.
Workflow You can have types of users that can only post drafts,
not publish to the front page.
Typographical niceties WordPress uses the Texturize engine to
intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities.
This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication
symbols, and ampersands. For information about the proper use of such entities
see Peter Sheerin's article "The Trouble With Em ’n En".
Intelligent text formatting If you've dealt with systems that
convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name: if
you have any sort of HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line
indiscriminately, breaking your formatting and validation. Our function for
this intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level
HTML tags, so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.
Multiple authors WordPress' highly advanced user system allows up
to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable)
privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.
Bookmarklets Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your
blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.
Ping away WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum
exposure for your blog to search engines.