20 years of WordPress

It feels hard for me to believe, but today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress (you can see the initial announcement here). The story of WordPress actually began earlier, with a project called b2/cafelog in 2001. It was a similar product that was essentially abandoned by its creators, so Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little took over development, renamed it WordPress, and released it on May 27, 2003.

I find it amazing that for everyone on our team other than me, WordPress has been around for more than half of their lifetime.

If you’re familiar with WordPress today, you’ll notice that the version from 2003 looks wildly different:

It was roughly a year later when I first tried it out, with my first post on May 24, 2004. It was quite a bare-bones system at that point, and I had to hack it just to add a normal editor and the ability to upload images.

Today WordPress powers 43% of the entire internet, which is staggering. The second most popular platform these days is Joomla, with just 2.6% of the web — far less than 1/10 of what WordPress has.

A big part of this reason is that growth begets growth. As WordPress has grown in popularity, there have been more themes and plugins created, and more people that know how to use it. As those have grown, it’s brought more people around and the cycle…