So how did it this WordPress thing start?
Unexpected Greatness
WordPress is in a war right now (October 2024 with WP Engine, one of its premier partners). It’s causing many to look into the roots of WordPress. Where did this thing come from? Is it a company or software? Who owns it?
Early Days of WordPress
WordPress came to life, as many great products do, as a solution to a problem. In 2002, at age 19, freshman student and software nerd Matt Mullenweg was looking for a new blogging platform to replace blogger when he stumbled upon an open-source codebase project called b2. b2 was a one man project from a guy in Corsica that needed work, but had many of the attributes he wanted.
But the project seemed kind of dormant. Michel Valdrighi, the originator, wasn’t answering messages, the code wasn’t evolving. Since it was open source, anyone could make a snapshot of it and turn it into a new starting codebase that they could evolve as they please. That’s what Matt did, with some help. And history was made.
Matt “forked” the code with the help of another guy named Mike Little. Forking is a software term for making a copy of software code and letting it develop separately, and differently from its original exact twin. The first public version of WordPress, version 0.7, was launched in May of 2003
Others joined quickly as contributors and together built a simple, useful, beautiful website authoring + management system that almost anyone could use. And it was still “free” except for the cost of hosting. WordPress grew into a full fledged content management system, using industry standard open source software PHP to generate pages, MySQL database, and some JavaScript. It also fostered a strong, positive community and career path with an attitude of “all are welcome.”
The ecosystem around WordPress grew quickly into its own industry –– WordPress themes and plug-ins New companies formed to take advantage of this new market
As WordPress grew into a full fledged content management system, using industry standard open source software PHP to generate pages, MySQL database, and some JavaScript. The best part was that most users, website builders didn’t need to worry about any of this. The user interface was all point and click; anyone could use it.
I became an enthusiastic user of WordPress in 2009, as a blogger on WordPress.com (tomnora.wordpress.com), and have built dozens of websites using WordPress over the past 15 years. I love WordPress, and have advocated it and spoken at conferences known as WordCamps. I still have about a dozen sites that I manage with very little effort.
Matt probably didn’t imagine that he would someday have a net worth of $500 million and pretty much “control” half of the internet with that code based he forked in 2003. Hiis company, AUTOMATTIC, is now a multi-billion dollar entity. More about that soon…