On this day 18 years ago WordPress was released for the first time. Let’s look at some interesting facts about the world’s most used website building software.
The Predecessor
You probably haven’t heard of b2/cafelog – a blogging tool created by the French programmer Michel Valdrighi in 2001. It was designed for writing blogs by generating pages dynamically, which was a major innovation 20 years ago. Besides that, b2 is both the predecessor of WordPress and the reason of its existence.
The Birth of WordPress
In the end of 2002, Valdrighi stopped maintaining b2/cafelog without any notice. Matt Mullenweg, who was actively using Valdrighi’s software for his travel blog, was concerned about the lack of developer’s support:
“My blogging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay… 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…”
~ Matt Mullenweg
On May 27th 2003, WordPress 0.7, the first version of WordPress was released by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little
The Jazz
As a student, Matt studied jazz saxophone. His love to jazz music resulted in the famous “Hello Dolly” demo, which can be seen in every release since 2004. The plugin serves as a tribute to Louis Armstrong:
“Hello Dolly symbolizes the hope and enthusiasm of an entire generation summed up in two words sung most famously by Louis Armstrong.”
~ Matt Mullenweg
The Leader
Today, 18 years after its first release, WordPress is powering 41% of all existing websites. With its countless features and plugins, it has become the most preferred website builder all around the world. WordPress has won a number of awards and is continuously extending its functionalities and support.
Here at Boldit Studio we follow the latest trends in web design and do our best to create unique online identities for our customers, making sure their presence will not be left unnoticed. This would’ve been much harder and not so much fun without the flexibility, reliability and user-friendliness of WordPress. So cheers to that and happy 18th birthday, WordPress!
