30 May 2013

Happy 10th Anniversary, WordPress!

30 May 2013
Happy 10th Anniversary, WordPress!

WP10Today, WordPress celebrates its tenth anniversary and we wanted to take a moment to congratulate them. Ten years is a hefty amount of time by any standard—to put it in web terms, WordPress is older than Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, and of course Envato.

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL which runs on a Web hosting service. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, powering over 60 million websites worldwide.

It was first released on May 27, 2003, by founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. As of April 2013, version 3.5 had been downloaded over 18 million times. WordPress has come from humble beginnings – starting from a single piece of code in 2003, designed to enhance the look and feel and layout of everyday blogging projects, to an international platform used by almost half of the top blogs in the world.

It’s amazing what can happen in a decade. Since 2003, WordPress has grown from a veritably unknown platform used by merely a handful of people, to the largest self-hosting blogging platform in the world. Today marks the WordPress 10th Anniversary – and all over the world, WordPress enthusiasts will meet up, celebrate, and share stories about their own WordPress journeys.

Because WordPress’ key developers share a passion for jazz music, all major releases of WordPress since version 1.0 have been codenamed in honour of some of the all time great jazz musicians – from Miles Davis to Ella Fitzgerald. In fact, the tradition of naming releases after jazz greats has been broken only once, in 2006, with the release of WordPress 2.0.5. This version was named Ronan in a congratulatory nod to Ryan Boren after the birth of his son – the first WP baby.

Davis, released 3 January 2004

WordPress 1.0 marked the first version of the software to be named after a famous jazz musician – in this case one of the most revered American jazz trumpeters and composers, Miles Davis (1926 – 1991). This release added features designed to match the leading tool in the market at that time, which was Movable Type. These features included search engine friendly permalinks, multiple categories, super-simple installation and upgrade, comment moderation and more.

Elvin, released 11 December 2012

The most recent major release at the time of WordPress’ 10th Anniversary, version 3.5 was named after jazz drummer, and another member of the John Coltrane Quartet, Elvin Jones (1927 – 2004). This release featured a completely re-imagined and streamlined interface for uploading photos and creating galleries, a refreshed style of dashboard, a new colour picker, and support for Apple’s Retina Display by making everything retina-ready with high-resolution graphics. In the days leading up to the WordPress 10th Anniversary, WordPress 3.5 had been downloaded more than 20 million times.

WordPress began as only a blogging system, but over the past decade has evolved into a full content management system limited only by the imaginations of users, as so impeccably illustrated by the thousands of user-created plugins, widgets and themes used worldwide for further WordPress customisation.

No matter what the future has in store for WordPress, there is no denying the powerful effect the platform has had on the web over the past decade. For that, WordPress, we salute you. Happy 10th Anniversary.

Nexonta Technologies Inc

Sources, Wikipeda-WP Historical Data Blog!!