What's WordPress.org?

In the world outside your company's four walls, WordPress and Blogger are the two primary blogging sites most people use. WordPress has one important difference: it allows you to download the blogging environment for free and install it on your corporate Intranet server. In other words, it allows you to build a blog for your own internal use.

When you use this version of WordPress (Wordpress.org), you can select from a plethora of plug-ins that can help you extend the usefulness of your blog. As I mentioned in the previous post, we use something called Subscribe2 that allows users to subscribe to the blog and receive e-mail messages when a new message is posted. The number of plug-ins is as varied as the needs of the people who use WordPress.

WordPress.org is an open source product. In other words, you get the programming for free and you can build your own plug-ins based on your needs. It's sort of like of Microsoft were to make Word's source code available to the world and let people build their own enhancements.

The advantage of hosting the blog software yourself is enormous. Your organization can have a professional blogging backbone within your firewall for free. On the other hand, your IT organization will have to install and maintain the software.

WordPress or any other blogging software makes it easy for you to render posts written in basic HTML. If you want to go beyond what the text editor allows, though, such as adding tables, you need to write the tables in HML. (It's really not that hard. Just Google HTML reference.)