When was wordpress started

We understand that the history of WordPress is evolving at a rapid pace. That is why Kinsta is dedicated to updating this guide as changes happen in the world of WordPress.

Furthermore, this is not only a guide of statistics. This is a guide to understanding what WordPress is, and how the history of this dynamic community can affect your business.

This guide will provide you with information about the major building blocks and players, so you can understand how every aspect of WordPress works. T he history of WordPress starts like most others, with an initial idea from an everyday guy turned genius looking to solve a problem he had at the time.

In this case, the year was Matt Mullenweg , a college student at the time, installed the b2 or cafelog blogging system for personal use. After hundreds maybe thousands of commits to the official SVN repository, the first version, WordPress 0. WordPress 1. Mullenweg has an affinity for jazz greats. He names all updates after Jazz greats from the past and today.

In addition, Matt used to include a plugin called Hello Dolly in every release. This plugin is a long-standing tribute to Louis Armstrong. Hello Dolly plugin symbolizes the hope and enthusiasm of an entire generation summed up in two words sung most famously by Louis Armstrong.

At Kinsta, we can think of no better way to describe the appearance of WordPress than as a symbol of hope and enthusiasm for an entire generation of website owners. Furthermore, this platform was the first platform that would resemble the WordPress we know today. With search engine friendly permalinks, multiple categories, simple installations, upgrade capabilities, and comment moderation the software was a true blogging system and maybe an early CMS, however at the time those features were restricted to those with programming experience.

That same year, WordPress caught a lucky break when competitor Movable Type decided to change their pricing structure. Looking for an alternative, WordPress was the best choice. He would drop out of college to take this job, and moved from Houston to San Francisco.

He worked there for a year, and left in October, That same month, he created the Akismet comment spam filter for WordPress. This plugin is still to this day, one of the most popular comment spam protectors for blogs. This was the first sign of growing outside confidence in the platform.

The Duke 2. This was a major overhaul of the dashboard along with improved speed and efficiency with the posts and image uploading. Despite having thousands of users, the company now had only 5 employees. WordCamps are annual events that volunteers organize for users and developers to get together and discuss all things WordPress.

The annual meeting in San Francisco is the main event, where Matt Mullenweg gives his annual update called State of the Word. The next month, Automattic purchased Gravatar. This is the first in a series of purchases Automattic makes to bring in related technology to improve the WordPress platform for users. This is important because within the next few years they will make some strategic acquisitions with this funding.

While we know there is a line between Automattic, the company, and the WordPress open source project, sometimes that line is blurry.

As a good example of that blurred line is their first key acquisition, which was BuddyPress. BuddyPress is the social networking platform that runs on WordPress. It has spawned an entire legion of secondary plugins for this useful addon. Furthermore, was also the launch of the WordPress Theme Directory.

Anyone can develop and upload their themes to this directory and make it available for free to tens of thousands of visitors, the only criteria is that it has to pass a quality check first. This update helped admins with features like automatic installation of themes and the addition of the CodePress editor to help web developers with the coding of their sites was also important.

If I wanted to single out one particular update that I think was groundbreaking, it would definitely be the 3. The inclusion of the feature for custom post types has opened the gates to all kinds of customizations of the content types you can manage with WordPress. Previously there were only posts, pages and taxonomies ; now you could create a post type for restaurants for example and using custom fields you could add a bunch of key-value pairs to describe that particular object.

WordPress 3. This made it easier to change specific pages without having to rummage around your site for the posts and pages you wanted to update. Plus building upon the great CMS features of 3. In July, they surpass 50 million WordPress blogs. This growth will keep going. Skipping forward to January , Automattic acquires Simperium, the note-keeping app. This is useful for developers creating apps to keep track of what they are working across a large team sprawled across the world.

For example, perhaps you want to create a WordPress plugin or theme with developers in Delhi, Boston, and San Francisco. Now you have a single system to organize the notes for the app. Starting in December came a major change with the WordPress 3. For the first time, since the Davis update, the core team revamped the look and feel of the Dashboard. They also made the WordPress admin interface responsive.

This means that the platform can work as well on a mobile or tablet device as a computer. Longreads is a news aggregator specialized in the ever more popular long-form style of writing.

This includes the WordPress. As longtime Longreads. Scroll Kit closed down. It seems that WordPress was more interested in the coders than they were in the company.

Also in April, the core team released the WordPress 3. This update is changing how WordPress works with future automatic version updates. Hopefully even long abandoned, self-hosted blogs will get automatically updated to the latest versions making the perception of WP being insecure a lot less common. The company itself has only employees. Considering how the other tech giants like Google, Facebook, Yahoo!

Almost makes your head spin as you think about all WordPress has achieved in the past 14 years. However, this is just the beginning. The founders, the core contributors and the whole community have created a dynamic platform that WordPress employees and traffic Data src: About Automattic. The WordPress 4.

Uploading media became easier, since it was all presented in a beautiful grid format. Embeds also turned into a more fluent process. This worked with various links, so the embedding process became more visual in nature. On the editor side of things, the developers wanted to keep the editing tools in view at all times. Therefore, the editor would start expanding to fit your content as you wrote. The final main addition with 4. They implemented a better search, new metrics and a more visual experience to see exactly what types of plugins were coming up after the search.

WordPress 4. For example, it allowed for assigning menus, customizing them and even managing them from a mobile device. As an example, putting before and after a line of text would turn it into a header. In addition, the site icon upload removed the need to go out and find a third-party favicon plugin. Better passwords made for stronger security, while the smoother admin experience ensured that modifications were easier on any device. They also added a Customize button on the frontend of site, along with the rollout of all comments being turned off on pages.

Some other formatting shortcuts were provided, such as the ability to add horizontal lines in an instant. One of the more impressive updates involved the Preview button. Since websites need to look great on all devices, it made sense that they made the previews mobile responsive.

Custom logos came along with the update, and the smart image resizing brought images up much faster without any changes to the page speed. Some of the other features with WordPress 4. In previous versions of WordPress you may have noticed that installing a plugin currently redirects you to the loading screen.

One problem many webmasters have is locating broken links. Another problem came along when users tried to disable revisions. It affected the autosave feature, but the new changes should fix that. Back when WordPress started, it utilized the Open Sans font to ensure that all devices rendered similar font sizes and styles. This has changed in the past, but WordPress is reverting back to it. Therefore, you may notice some changes to the way your backend user interface looks.

However, the modification is meant to help out with mobile backend users. The theme customizer was been completely redone. They added new shortcut icons which you can click and go directly to the field in question.

Building menus in the customizer became much easier as you could create pages while building them. And you could finally add custom CSS within the customizer. Thanks to the customize API and the new focus of the WordPress team on the theme customizer, developers are now building various customizer frameworks to elevate and provide a unique editing experience for WordPress users.

For developers, you can now register post type templates. This included the visual editor being accessible inside widgets, as well as a new image widget, video widget, and audio widget.

Along with the WordPress 4. Previously when you would select a link and edit it, sometimes you would end up linking the word next to it, or not being able to move the cursor outside the link element. To help better resolve this issue they have added what they call link boundaries, or rather blue borders around them when they are selected.

The latest version, WordPress 4. It was simply displayed in plain text. With WordPress 4. This is great news, especially for developers, as it is now easier to quickly make small code changes, as well as tweak CSS in the customizer. Another changed that was introduced was a new way to save changes in the Customizer. Thanks to changesets, user customizations can be saved as drafts or scheduled to be published in the future.

This means that site admins can discard changes and restore the Customizer to the last published state before the final publication.

Being an open source platform, WordPress helped tens of thousands of people find work. In this section, we want to expand past WordPress to look at the companies that make up the ecosystem. Theme marketplaces make up a huge part of the ecosystem.

Almost microcosms of the entire WordPress community, these marketplaces are a great place to connect with different WordPress developers, users, and contractors. Changing the design of your WP based site is fairly easy: instead of creating a full web design from scratch, you can turn to a theme shop and for a small investment you can choose from thousands of designs to find the one you have in your mind.

Nowadays you can find more than 4, premium themes on ThemeForest and the number is increasing rapidly. This reflects the huge demand for premium WordPress themes quite well. Standing right next to the popularity of ThemeForest is WooThemes.

You might have heard of them if you have an ecommerce site, because their WooCommerce plugin is by far the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress. Back in there were only a couple people selling WP themes, and I had a few free themes available for download on my website, which got a lot of traction. I also got a lot of requests for the customization of these free themes, and that is when we saw the potential and started WooThemes.

I also believe we offer some of the best support in the WP marketplace, which is why customers keep coming back. Their flagship, Zerif theme, is an awesome single-page design, loved and used by hundreds of thousands not exaggerating of users worldwide.

CopyBlogger is one of the most visited blogs on the planet. It is only fitting that his theme company has over , website owners using his premium WordPress theme framework.

The team over at Organic Themes has been creating and designing fresh WordPress themes since They currently have over , users and a large library of 36 responsive themes for artists, businesses, and bloggers. WPZOOM is a small team dedicated to helping individuals and businesses engage with their audiences across the web. When you think of iThemes , one word might come to your mind: Builder.

This framework and the themes built on top of it allow you to create your own layout, so you can customize the entire site the way you want it to look.

If you want to create a squeeze page with a completely different layout than the rest of the website, you can create one in a couple of minutes, and still keep the rest of your site as is. Mojo Themes is another huge marketplace. It has been around since , and is gaining a reputation for quality WordPress themes as well as two other popular CMS systems : Drupal and Joomla. We started the marketplace because we thought we could make an impact on open source software and especially WordPress market and ecosystem.

We are passionate about the individual communities and felt that providing an avenue for designers and developers to make money would be a great place to start. We have worked hard to build up a friendly atmosphere within the company and to be personally available for our sellers and buyers.

I like to think that people come back to MOJO because they trust us and they know that they can get ahold of us if they have a problem. We really try and live by small town rules. It seems that often it can be very easy to hide behind your computer and not respond to a customer when they need you the most.

I think WordPress will grow a lot in terms of the technology in the next few years. It seems to me at least that WordPress has been tailored to personal bloggers but I can see WordPress introducing more enterprise-like features and functionality. We will see a big increase in applications powered by it. Elegant Themes has one of the best theme promotions in the industry.

Therefore, it is no surprise that they have over , clients. This list grows every year as they come out with new ones about once a month. Just as important as theme developers and shops are the coders who extend the basic functionalities of WordPress with all kinds of extra features that make our lives so much easier. Keep in mind that thousands of individual developers create plugins as well, and the developers we discuss here are just a small part of a much larger plugin development community.

If you are looking for the best and most popular plugins we recommend you to take a look at this guide: Hand-picked list of the best WordPress plugins. Does your audience speak more than one language? Then WPML is the right plugin for you. It helps WordPress users with creating and publishing content in multiple languages.

You can easily translate your pages, posts and theme texts with it. Works with all WP versions above 3. Should you have any problems, the support team is there to help you! As with many businesses, one initial idea spurned further ideas and products. Translating website content is very difficult. You need to spend a great deal of time and effort setting up and maintaining a multilingual website. The complexities of translating all aspects of a website led to the creation of WPML, a plugin that manages content translation of websites from within the site admin page.

WordPress is by far the best CMS in terms of user experience and rewarding the efforts made. This addition helped simplify the creation of complex posts. Another essential feature added in was one-click updates. With this feature, more users were likely to complete updates with critical security patches.

Community-focused functionality continued to grow at the end of this period. Finally, with came the introduction of the custom post type. This boosted the flexible potential of WordPress even further and ushered in the age of meeting user needs. The addition of different post formats and an admin bar came in It also improved on the possibilities available to content creators.

The user-forward focus was paying off: In , 50 million blogs ran on WordPress. In , a new media manager was launched, making it even easier to add photos or videos to posts. This made WordPress a more welcoming place for media-heavy blogs and text-based creators who enjoyed the simplicity of the interface. Security and maintenance were evolving too. In , automatic updates were released. This functionality only applied to small updates, but it still saved people time.

The same year, developers took note of the trend toward mobile devices. As such, a new, more responsive interface was added to increase accessibility across multiple devices. In , streamlined access was a priority for users. Several drag-and-drop improvements were made to the Classic editor, facilitating a more intuitive creative process.

The developers also included a gallery preview option, taking significant guesswork out of the image posting equation. Another media innovation of this year was the new playlist feature. This worked for both audio and visual components, making it simpler for users to post several related media files in a truncated way. This enabled users to integrate other tools with the platform easily. This is due to its relatively recent history, and also because it marked the start of several influential new features.

This allowed users to make more stylistic changes through the Theme Editor. These widgets helped users add common content such as images and rich text in an intuitive way. After that, was a watershed year for WordPress history. Developers had been working on a project titled Gutenberg , available as a plugin during the creation stage. Gutenberg laid the foundations for the Block Editor , now the standard editor for WordPress, to thrive. The Block Editor was revolutionary because it made post creation a more flexible experience.

Each block was specialized for its content type. As such, the Block Editor marked a huge step forward for intuitive WordPress design. With came adjustments to the Block Editor, security updates, and better debugging tools. That brings us to today, in In the past couple of months, alterations have continued to roll out. Security has seen reinforcements, post-editing has been tweaked for ease of use, and behind-the-scenes technology has doubtless continued to develop.

WordPress plugins are third-party software that you can use to enhance your site. There are a huge number of these tools available today. You can search thousands of them with a visit to the WordPress Plugin Directory.

This repository has an inventory of over 58, plugins. Plugins made their debut in , with WordPress version 1. They were always meant to be crowd-sourced — that is, created and distributed by WordPress users themselves. These free-moving, effective extensions were instantly popular with fans.

In , Akismet became the first plugin to be pre-installed with WordPress. Akismet is an anti-spam tool that remains widely known and used to this day. With it, users could monitor their pages for harmful links or junk content.

The release of the tool was an early and significant move towards a more secure platform for all. This technology made it easier to use third-party software to curate a WordPress website. In , WordPress streamlined third-party software updates. Four years later, in , updates were made automatic for plugins, helping to keep sites secure and plugins operational. Today, the WordPress Plugin Directory remains a repository for third-party software.

Therefore, users can rest assured that they have various ways to personalize their WordPress site. WordPress themes have also played a critical role in the development of the platform.

Themes control the look and feel of your site, giving you the freedom to brand your site however you see fit. From the beginning, each version of WordPress included a default theme. The first of these was the Classic Theme , followed by Default also known as Kubrick. To give users more options, the WordPress Theme Directory was launched in , coming four years after its plugin counterpart.

The introduction of this freely available marketplace helped expand the potential for individuality while also supporting community interactions. As such, it was a big moment in WordPress history. The next important development for themes came in Users gained access to the Theme Customizer, opening up new possibilities for users willing to make adjustments.

Themes became easier than ever to curate for individual sites. Theme previews also started this year, providing a critical front-end view. One could argue that WordPress is a big deal in the web development space. So just what is WordPress? The main features are the template system and plugin architecture. Templates allow developers to build on a predefined structure as opposed to building out a site from scratch. The founders of WordPress operated on the philosophy that great software should work with minimal setup.

They aimed to make the tools easy to use and intuitive so that developers and designers spend their time creating. No matter what tools you use to build sites, there are many reasons why so many web agencies use WordPress.

They were looking to create an elegant and well-architected personal publishing system. It was a unique concept that brought about a new way of creating web pages.

This new concept, which gave birth to WordPress, was the idea of creating pages dynamically from MySQL database contents. By doing this, they were able to expand the power of the blog. While Michel Valdrighi worked throughout on the project, it was abandoned leaving users with concern over the future of the project. One of those concerned users was Matt Mullenweg. He wanted it to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger.

The year saw tremendous strides for the platform and was arguably the turning point for WordPress moving from another blogging platform to the CMS we know today. What that means is that WordPress is now free and open source. The contributions of developers around the globe help open source projects thrive. Around the same time, Ryan Boren created the plugin system.

It allowed them to offer functionality outside of the core elements of WordPress, maintaining the core while users explore other things that work for them. Version 1. In , we saw the branding of WordPress with the creation of their logo. After a process that lasted several months, May 15th was the day they finalized the logo. By WordPress launched their Theme Directory. Having a directory for themes allowed users to develop and upload themes for the public to use.