Wordpress.com vs Wordpress.org—what are the differences?

Most people still don’t understand the difference. I guess the problem with something being open source is that there’s not much effort on brand identity and so they didn’t bother making the names different and I personally find it very confusing.

The first, the one with the ‘.com’ is the one that offers a blogging service with a free Wordpress subdomain that is yournamehere.wordpress.com. There are some charges for premium services and features but other than that it’s free (and very powerful at ranking too!).

The second one, the ‘.org’ is the open source CMS or Content Management System. This is the system that is used by Wordpress.com and many other websites on the internet. It is the client-side publishing interface. The reason so many people are using it is because it’s very user-friendly, easy to use, very powerful, and at the same time it’s free. Anyone can now start their own website and use the blogging format for their business or personal use.

Basically, with the Wordpress CMS or any of the other free and open source CMS like Joomla or Drupal, people can use the ‘blogging’ concept to start their own social network of some sort (but of course it’s not limited to this only). The mixture of both server-side and client-side publishing makes the concept very interactive and attractive to consumers. And as I have discussed, everyone wants to tap into this social media market because it’s really so significant and powerful.

There’s a really big advantage to open source software. For instance, I find that VLC player is the best video player ever and can play almost any media format in existence. I don’t think I ever had a problem with playing something in VLC. I think the reason it is this powerful is because unlike other media players, VLC isn’t limited by copyright infringement issues with the owners of the codecs or media formats. Of course this is just my random speculation as I don’t really have a complete understanding of the technical and legal issues with these media software.

One example I learned during my internship would be http://hypebeast.com. This website uses the Wordpress CMS. It’s a really cool looking website with a lot of really neat features and content. So imagine for less than 20 dollars a year* (domain and hosting), you can create your website just like this one even without coding or web design expertise. It’s cheap and it’s automatically global.

I was studying a PHP basics video tutorial last night and learned that the P in PHP stands for PHP. That’s so weird.

*rates differ depending on what kind of space you need and how much traffic you are expecting