A Decade of WordPress

Hundreds of millions of websites feed us every day with limitless information and powerful tools. Neat. Incredibly, about one of every six are powered by the same publishing engine: WordPress. Matured from a simpler blogging platform, WordPress is today a powerful open source content management system, with a wealth of add-on features [thanks to daily plugin contributions by the vibrant WordPress developer community]. If you Internet, you WordPress, whether you know it or not.

If you could slice into the WordPress tree today [don’t!], you would find ten rings. Or nine? I’m not a dendrochronologist. The point is, developers have been honing WordPress since it’s inception exactly one decade ago. How WordPress happened is a pretty cool story, and a paragon of the open source philosophy. Appropriately, the story can still be read right from the blog on which it was born.

Ten years ago Matt Mullenweg posted a blog on his site expressing concern about the apparent lack of updates for his logging software, b2/cafelog, while simultaneously advocating for GPL software. Mike Little left a comment on that page offering to help Matt fork the b2 project [use it as the starting point for new software development] and the rest is proverbial history. It’s basically like the Wolverine Origins story except it isn’t a terribly cheesy movie already being remade again. Anyway, you can read how WordPress happened on Matt’s blog.

Thanks Matt and Mike, and props to all the awesome core and plugin developers working to make the www go round.