If you are interested in extending WordPress by writing plug-ins or decorating your blog with self-developed themes, go straight to the developers section and study the plug‑in APIs and theme documentation.

WordPress community also develops a cool forum named bbForum, which is also developed as an open-source forum module. This forum features different categories and sub-categories where you can directly post your problems and get help from thousands of users. You can also post solutions to other people’s problems.

The WordPress community is very active and you will find rapid solutions to your problems here.

If you are a WordPress theme or plug-in developer, you can publish your work in the plug-in or theme section of Codex, from where other people can find these updates. WordPress Codex is an interesting place for WordPress geeks.
WordPress comes with a great repository of themes and plug-ins that are contributed by its huge user community. Codex itself is the best place where you can find answers to almost every type of question regarding WordPress.

WordPress also maintains regular gatherings and meet‑ups on its IRC channel. If you want to participate just join #WordPress channel in irc.freenode.net with your favorite IRC client. You will find many developers and can talk to them directly. This is really great fun.

Before proceeding further, let us see the complete feature list of WordPress:

• Supports unlimited categories and sub-categories
• Automatic syndication by RSS and Atom
• Uses XML RPC interface for trackbacks and remote posting
• Can cope with email posting
• Supports plug-ins and themes (skinnable)
• Ability to import data from MovableType, Textpattern, Greymatter, b2evolution, and Blogger, which is a great advantage when you want to start your blog from an existing one
• Features extensive documents and a rich set of APIs to extend it
• Very easy to administer and maintain with no blogging experience required
• Very convenient search facility
• Instant publishing of content, no matter how long it is, unlike some other blog engine where it is really a headache to update a simple thing
• Multi-lingual blogging capability
• Very well-structured administration panel with tons of features
• Link manager

WordPress is the best tool to start blogging with. Its administration panel will simply help you like a wizard. WordPress recently released version 2.0, which is a great upgrade, and has a lot of eye-catching features. We will cover them in Chapter 4. WordPress is developed in PHP, the world’s most highly used scripting language, and uses MySQL as its database back end. So you not only get its cool features, but also the advantage of using the state-of-the-art database and scripting language. No doubt, WordPress will make your blogging life easier than ever. Let us now see some examples of other people’s blogs, Codex, and some of its extraordinary themes.