By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

I’ve been a bit harsh on WordPress the last few weeks and need to give them some credit. Credit for being able to grown a large business from open source software and in the process share those gains with independent publishers worldwide.

WordPress is a startup success story.

It can’t be easy to build such a business with the multitude of competing interests that one is confronted with on a daily basis. Interests like monetization, product roadmap, network capacity for scale, software for scale, public opinion, etc.

So last Friday I wrote about not being excited by the new WordPress beta. I’m not. That isn’t because the software isn’t top notch and free. It is because it doesn’t wow me. When it comes to functionality it presents not a single new feature that I myself find better than the previous version. And that’s ok. My wishes are a competing interest with other users and most likely in the minority, for now.

This blog, right here, the one that you are reading is running on WordPress. I am intimately acquainted with it as over the past 6 weeks i have written 134 blog posts using it. Through extensibility I’ve found it to be even more of a solid companion for allowing me to publish with more ease. I’ve blogged about the Zemanta and OpenCalais plugins for the admin panel and they have helped to greatly speed the process up of adding metadata.

With all of that said, WordPress did impress me yesterday with a scantily documented feature, that in my mind makes it more useful. And to make it more exciting it is a feature that I lauded Engadget and its development team for yesterday – URL graffiti.

Apparently, for over a year, hibernating in the WordPress codebase has been the ability to add multiple tags to a URL to create a query that will retrieve the corresponding content. A quick example being this link that looks up posts tagged with engadget, stylecaster and twitter. And they have the RSS component built in as well.

For all of the same reasons that I praised Engadget I will praise WordPress too. There seem to be many lesser documented features that make the platform a stronger engine for publishers. Maybe these are extensibility hooks that added in hopes that they will be enhanced later in the development cycle and they’ve fallen by the wayside.

Regardless, WordPress is a great product for those not wishing to build their own blogging platforms. Which, of course, I would say is north of 99.8% of bloggers. It offers the opportunity to self-publish in a way that very tools throughout history have for the cost.

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