When 30% of the web is celebrating something, it must be important 😉
Sweet sixteen is closing fast, we are celebrating WordPress’s 15th birthday this weekend. How many of you know why it’s this weekend and how everything started?
Once upon a time in America, young 19 years old, Matt Mullenweg lost all hope for his favorite blogging tool b2/cafelog, “My blogging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, I can only hope that he’s okay.”
He wondered out loud…
What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michael would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, even if I was to fall off the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I make would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to continue with it, they could. I’ve decided that this is the course of action I’d like to take, now all I need is a name. What else should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup for a Blogger. Someday, right?
One guy from the UK replied.
If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. Perhaps a post to the b2 forum, suggesting a fork would be a good starting point.
That guy was Mike Little the WordPress co-founder and this conversation occurred on January 25th, 2003 at 3:58 pm right after lunch. You should never make huge decisions on an empty stomach and they proved that this quote is right.
Just a few months later, the first WordPress version was out and that’s the date the entire galaxy celebrates as WordPress’s birthday.
Like any child, WordPress started to grow and to gain more skills, knowledge, and wisdom. Many people got involved in its education, designers, linguists, web developers, lecturers, system engineers – and all of them loved that child and they still do. Some of them even left their old careers to help WordPress grow and become what it is today. But what it is today?
Today it’s the CMS with the best and warmest community in the IT world and this community is organizing the biggest Birthday Bash ever for WordPress’s 15th birthday with more than 190 meetups announced around the world.
Happy birthday WordPress from all of us at WordCamp Europe!!!
Amazing story on how WordPress was born. Great things start so little.