WHAT IS WORDPRESS: WordPress is an open source blog publishing application. It is a state-of-the-art platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is the official successor to the b2/cafelog publishing system. WordPress is a fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature, stable and extremely robust product. The developers hope that by focusing on user experience and web standards they will be able to create a tool different from anything else out there. They have a point.

Some key features of WordPress:

• Full standards compliance: The developers have 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. Your website is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less. So they insist.
• No rebuilding: The changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
• 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. Have a new design every day.
• Intelligent text formatting: If you have dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name, you must be quite chagrined. WordPress, on the other hand, 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.

WORDPRESS AS A NEWS WEBSITE: Though WordPress is essentially a blogging software, it can be used to create less relatively complicated news portals. The newswatch.in site, in fact, was originally built on another blogging application called Nucleus CMS and subsequently rebuilt on WordPress. The old archives of newswatch.in have not been deleted — if you want to see how a WordPress news portal looks and feels like, visit http://oldcontent.newswatch.in/.

The old site was built with WordPress 1.2 and last upgraded to 2.0, which was the latest version at the time. The installation used as many as 27 plugins. There were very few hacks into the core; but yes, there were some. The reason it still looks different is that the unique theme was built not using conventional blogging logic, and was customised to suit the display needs of the newswatch.in site at that time.

However, if you believe that WordPress would be too simplistic for your news website, you might want to go in for Drupal.