Celebrating 20 Years of WordPress (UPDATED)
May 27, 2023, marks exactly 20 years since Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked b2/cafelog to create WordPress Version 0.70. Quite a bit has taken place in the past 20 years, and imagine how much more we can accomplish together in the next 20!
UPDATE
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Joe Brockmeier: WordPress, poster child of the LAMP stack, turns 20
WordPress turned 20 over the weekend. Older than that, if you count the b2 codebase WordPress forked from. 20 years for a project is quite an accomplishment, but WordPress hasn’t merely survived for 20 years. The open source CMS powers a huge chunk of the Internet and has shown how commerce and community can coexist successfully for the long haul.
It’s hard to convey how impressive WordPress was when it was launched, if you haven’t dabbled with the CMSes of the time. By the time WordPress 1.0 was released, I’d fussed with static site generators (Blosxom), phpWebLog, and even Slashcode. Standing up a CMS on shared hosting was non-trivial.
Here was WordPress. Easy to install, easy to use, ran well on minimal hardware if you didn’t have heavy traffic, and entirely free. It was just a few steps and you could have a blog running in five minutes on a shared hosting account. You could have a site set up in an hour if you were happy with a stock theme.
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WP20 & Audrey Scholars
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth spending our time on. There will be celebrations in cities around the world, please join if there’s one happening near you.