WordPress has “almost” become a household name
… as of February 2023. It’s not as ubiquitous as Kleenex or Jello, but for those in the web world, it has become invaluable.
Perhaps you’re looking a creating a WordPress blog today. If that’s the case then be aware WordPress is a popular website builder which is the engine behind more than 43% of all websites on the internet. But every success story starts with humble beginnings.
In this article, we’ll look back at the history of WordPress and show you its progression from startup to the massive success it’s become.
Open source communities have contributed so much to our technical existence and WordPress is one of those platforms that benefited from thousands of selfless contributions. How can WordPress be free? Because it came from the contributions of so many developers who just wanted to be a small part of something so useful. And they continue to contribute to its collective success today.
The Origin
Developers started a precursor to WordPress by building a blogging software called b2/cafelog. It was continued by the original developers. Two of the users of b2/cafelog were none other than Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. If you google their names today you’ll see thousands of pages of attributes to the platform. They decided in 2003 Mike and Matt decided to build a new blogging platform on top of b2/cafelog.
They had no idea at the time what they were doing would turn into something so beneficial and help millions of users around the planet. Nor did they have the slightest idea that thousands of developers, writers, designers and creatives would build a successful career around this platform.
It was May 27, 2003, when Matt announced the release of the first version of WordPress. It was well-received by the tech community. Matt and Mike made sizeable improvements on the b2 Cafelog blogging framework. The first version of WordPress included a new admin interface, new templates, and generated XHTML 1.1 compliant templates.
Fast forward to May 2004, version 1.2 of WordPress came with the now all too familiar plugin architecture. This enabled users and developers to improve the functionality of WordPress by writing their own plugins and sharing them with the rest of the quickly growing WordPress community.
As WordPress picked up speed, the chief rival at the time, Moveable Type was making decisions that ultimately led to their downfall. Their licensing terms drove people away. And they ultimately ended up finding and improving on WordPress. With the help of so many contributors, WordPress 1.2 released a stable platform with features being offered by competitors. But, given that WordPress was not charging, the user rates exploded.
And the improvements just kept on coming with the help of the development community.
In February 2005, WordPress 1.5 was released with Pages, comment moderation tools, a new default theme Kubrick, and a completely new Theme System. Co founder Matt Mullenweg put it this way:
In 1.5 we have created an incredibly flexible theme system that adapts to you rather than expecting you adapt to it. You can have your entire weblog run through a single file, just like before, or you can literally have a different template for every single different category. It’s as much or as little as you want. We’ve also broken common site elements like headers, footers, and sidebars into their own files so you can make a change in one place and see it everywhere immediately.
Matt Mullenweg
Nearing the end of 2005, WordPress 2.0 was released with a new admin dashboard. A complete overhaul had taken place revamping the administration screens.
Using JavaScript and DHTML, a better user interface was created. Users weren’t required to load a page to make simple changes. And a huge advancement occurred. The creation of categories and tags for posts could be made without leaving the post editor and you could delete comments without reloading the comments screen.
Users will also delighted with a new admin UI in this release.
This was the first release that came with Akismet anti-spam plugin pre-installed. It also came with a WordPress database backup plugin, wp-db-backup. It was hailed at the time but later dropped in 2007. This same release also marked the introduction of the functions.php file in the theme system.
On March 1, 2006, Automattic, the company founded by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, filed the trademark registration for WordPress and WordPress logo.
Recognizing that they had something big on their hands, co-founder Matt Mullenweg, formed Automattic in March of 2006 and filed a trademark registering WordPress and the WordPress logo.
Knowing improvements were still needed, a web design firm called Happy Cog joined the WordPress project in 2008. They set out to design a new WordPress admin interface. They conducted a usability study to create something universally easy to navigate.
New features followed such as shortcodes, one-click updates, and built-in plugin installation were added to WordPress with subsequent releases.
In 2010, Automattic, the company founded by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, transferred the ownership of WordPress trademark and logo to the WordPress Foundation. This was a wise and selfless move because it set the path for a movement that would long outlive the founders. It paved the way for continued growth with the help of ongoing contributors for generations to come.
In 2010, CMS had become a big buzzword and industry unto itself. At this time, WordPress 3.0 was released. It moved in the direction of setting WordPress up as a CMS and brought about several features such as better custom taxonomies, custom backgrounds, custom post types, header, menus, contextual help on admin screens and more. The result was Multisite networks when WordPress MU merged into WordPress core group.
This also marked the release of the Twenty Ten theme. A new default theme was to be released with each passing year.
Another important year was 2011 with the addition of Post formats and the admin bar being added.
And as people became more comfortable with purchasing items through their computers, WordPress eCommerce plugins started to surface. WordPress users seized the opportunity to add this simple functionality and build their own online stores.
Designers will pleased to see theme customizer, theme previews and a new media manager being introduced in 2012. New users also welcomed the ability to create image galleries and preview a theme before taking the plunge and deciding to make the change.
When WordPress 3.7 was released in 2013 it was suggested that an automatic update feature would make it easier for site owners to keep their software up to date. This is still something carefully measured to this day because of conflicts that can arise.
What was interesting was that it was about this time when the blogging, CMS and tech world were now in agreement. WordPress had become the most popular CMS on the planet.
MP6 was released in December of 2013, under WordPress 3.8. This was the new WordPress admin interface. The rising popularity of mobile devices and multiple screens brought about this responsive interface and provided a much better user experience, regardless of screen size.
In 2014, WordPress released version 3.9 The objective was to improve the visual post editor. You could now drag and drop images directly into the post editor, making the process much faster. And users were then able to edit images inside the editor and see their gallery previews inside the editor. This version also introduced live widget previews, audio playlists and other improvements.
It was a busy year in 2014 as additional refinements were made to the core with subsequent releases of version 4.0 and 4.1.
And a sign of the universal acceptance of WordPress was marked by this being the first year non-English downloads surpassed English downloads.
In 2015 three versions were released. WordPress 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4. These releases concentrated on emoji support, the theme customizer, localization, and creating infrastructure for the WordPress REST API.
Also in 2015, the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin, WooCommerce, was purchased by Automattic.
2016 saw the release of WordPress 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7. Improvements were coming out at a rapid pace now. 2016 saw the use of streamlined updates for plugins and themes, a custom css feature for the theme customizer, and content recovery with the help of browser storage. Towards the end of 2016 WordPress.org publicly announced it was supporting HTTPs.
The following year in 2017, WordPress 4.8 and 4.9 were released. These versions introduced several new default widgets to add video, images, audio, gallery, HTML and rich text. And the foundation for the soon to be introduced WordPress block editor began.
2018 saw WordPress 5.0. It introduced a brand new experience for editing. Finally, WordPress block editor was made available and affectionately called Gutenberg. It was an homage to one of the originators of modern communication, the printing press.
More importance than ever was put on the block editor as the WordPress community embraced it almost universally.
In 2019, acknowledging the importance of creating a more secure platform, the Site Health project was released into the core. Starting with version 5.1, Site Health would announce when older PHP versions were detected. It also improved secure log in capabilities when critical errors occurred within the WordPress dashboard.
In 2020, the global pandemic presented a number of issues that slowed numerous developer events that would have normally given rise to faster enhancements and improvements to subsequent WordPress versions. Virtual events allowed for some enhancements to continue.
Virtual work was already quite common and three major versions were released. 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6.
The full site editing experience began to roll out along with automatic updates, block director and block patterns as well as the introduction of lazy loading images.
In 2021, more progress was made on full site editing features with WordPress 5.7 and 5.8. A new templates feature was introduced as well as several site-wide blocks. This enabled one to easily create site-wide templates.
Progress has continued to be made improving the block editor as developers worked towards a full site editing solution.
Over the last few years, WordPress has continued to improve the block editor in an effort to offer a full site editing solution.
A lot of progress has been made in this area, but many experts still recommend readers use a drag & drop WordPress page builder instead for more design control.
In 2022, and 2023 WordPress will continue to improve, enhance and release new versions. Building on the foundational elements in the 5.9 and 6.0 releases for block themes and style variations, version 6.1 saw the new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, include 10 different styles . And it’s even more notable because it is “Accessibility Ready”.
6.2 is expected early in 2023 and the enhancements will continue towards the goal of maintaining the title, the most popular CMS on the planet.
