The origin of WordPress, the website building tool that serves as the framework for around 40% of the world’s websites, is more mundane than it deserves to be. There was no moment of profound insight or inspiration in the website platform’s genesis. There was simply a business problem and a solution one man came up with to solve it, in a market with few competitors at a time when blogging was about to explode.
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, was the main architect (and co-creator) of the open-source WordPress content management system (CMS). WordPress was a fork, or a modification, of a blogging tool called b2/cafelog. Cafelog was Mullenweg’s blogging platform until it began to languish, having been all but abandoned by its creator. Mullenweg recorded these events in his blog, currently residing at ma.tt. It lists many of WordPress’s milestones as well as the details of the platform’s creation.
In a January 24, 2003 entry titled, “The Blogging Software Dilemma” (which you an read at https://ma.tt/2003/01/the-blogging-software-dilemma/), Mullenweg complained that his blogging tool, b2/cafelog hadn’t been updated in months, and that his attempts to reach out to its developer had gone unanswered. Mullenweg’s tech blog had just hit an important milestone, and stability was top of mind, and he was justifiably concerned.
Mullenweg reasoned that because b2 was open source, he understood he could simply create a fork of it, meaning, he could create a new blogging tool based upon the b2 source code. It would also be an open-source tool. He asked his readers for volunteers assisting with the project, which he promised would have “the flexibility of Movable Type, the parsing of Text Pattern, the hack-ability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger.”
Cue the sound of crickets. No one volunteered to help Mullenweg with the project (but if they’d been able to foresee its future they certainly would have). Then one person did respond: Mike Little, a programmer from England. With no one else in consideration for the position, Little was hired on the spot.
Mullenweg and Little began working remotely and asynchronously in earnest, and several months later they released the first version of the tool Christine Selleck Tremoulet suggested they call WordPress. Lawyers would surely have steered them away from use of a trademark so similar to Microsoft’s flagship word processor, but without any alternative names proffered, the underwhelming name stuck.
WordPress 0.7 was released on May 27, 2003, just four months after the project had been announced. Mullenweg was at the time just 19 years old.
WordPress was well received by the blogging community. It was a fairly simple blogging tool, and as a continuation of someone else’s idea, it wouldn’t be fair to call it Mullenweg’s a bit more refined. But it was good enough as an initial release of software, and version. Compared to the WordPress of today, its feature set was much more rudimentary, but in that simplicity lie one of its strengths: WordPress was very easy to use and learn.
WordPress version 1.2, however, was the release that saw the platform begin to really get noticed. That version introduced the plugins engine, which allows the platform to be extended in almost any way imaginable. It turns out that a blogging platform — static web pages combined with a dynamically-generated blog — is a remarkably versatile foundation for a website. It can be the basis for many different use cases, up to and including a fully functioning e-commerce store. Plugins make that possible.
WordPress 1.2 didn’t just introduce plugins, though. It also opened up their development to the entire WordPress community. WordPress’s users became collaborators in its development. Literally anyone could create a plugin for WordPress, which fostered excitement and generated buzz. Accordingly, adoption of WordPress began to skyrocket.
As more people became involved in developing WordPress, the software naturally got better. Version 1.5 introduced themes, downloadable add-ons that change the look and feel of an entire website without requiring any coding. Like plugins, themes were open to development by anyone, guaranteeing that the upward trajectory in WordPress’s adoption would continue.
With the introduction of the themes functionality, all of the elements were in place that today are credited with making WordPress a success:
- themes,
- plugins,
- open-source development model,
- low cost,
- simplicity,
- extensibility, and
- engaged user community.
