As the 11th anniversary of WordPress comes to a pass, we celebrate how it became a behemoth in the blogging world and has even expanded to a full content management system.
As integrated into the internet that WordPress is currently, it did not always used to be this way. WordPress was released on May 27, 2003 by its founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, as a branch of it precursor b2/cafelog. The company’s about page says that “WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system.” This system was built on the popular scripting language, PHP, and MySQL, the self-proclaimed “world’s most popular open source database.” The end goal for WordPress is to create a tool different from anything else out there by concentrating on user experience and web standards.
WordPress is an open source project, meaning that there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it and that users are free to use it for almost anything without paying anyone a license fee as well as numerous other important freedoms.
WordPress has tons of uses and as it says, “WordPress is limited only by your imagination (and tech chops).” Being an open source project, people are working on it and tweaking WordPress all the time. Some of the things that have been added to WordPress are plugins, widgets and themes. Plugins are software components that add specific features to an existing software application. Common examples of this are Adobe Flash Player and Java. Widgets are stand-alone applications that can be embedded into websites, such as a weather radar or forecast. Themes are interesting as they are preset packages that contain graphical appearance details that can be used to personalize or tailor the look and feel of an operating system or a piece of software. For example, a Tar Heel fan could use a UNC theme to change his iPod touch background to a picture of the basketball court and have the apps become UNC logos.
WordPress quickly became a blogging sensation and as of May 2013 it powered a staggering 18% of the web. WordPress has also kept statistics on their success. As of this month over 409 million people viewed more than 14.5 billion pages each month on average. They also delve deeper into their stats and note that WordPress users generate about 42.6 million new posts per month. Those posts are responsible for 54.5 million new comments each month, as well.
Since that fateful day in May 2003 when WordPress was released it has since revealed 22 updated versions each building on its past versions. They have two more versions scheduled for release in 2014. Version 4.0 should be released sometime in the fall and version 4.1 should be released at the end of the year.
As WordPress gets older, it continues to grow and adapt to its web-environment and this can definitely be attributed to its success along with access to the content management systems market with 53.8% of the market share.