The end of May saw a very happy birthday for WordPress, as the web’s favourite CMS turned a whopping fourteen years old. Far from being a tempestuous teenager, WordPress continues to go from strength to strength and as co-creator, Matt Mullenweg, wrote in his birthday blog post, he couldn’t be happier about the direction WordPress is going in:
Today is 14 years from the very first release of WordPress. The interface I’m using to write this (Calypso) is completely unrecognizable from what WordPress looked and worked like even a few years ago. Fourteen years in, I’m waking up every day excited about what’s coming next for us. The progress of the editor and CLI so far this year is awesome, and I’m looking forward to that flowing into improvements for customization and the REST API.
The first version of WordPress was released on May 27th 2003 and the original release note are still available on WordPress.org. The main features highlighted include:
- Texturize
- WordPress Links – comprised of a link manager with integrated weblogs.com support
- XHTML 1.1 Compliance
- Intelligent Line Breaks
- Manual Excerpts – allowing users to handcraft post summaries to appear in RSS feeds
It’s fascinating to look at how far WordPress has come in a relatively short space of time, in less than a decade and a half the CMS now powers over 27.5% of all global websites and WordPress sites receive over 24.6 billion views per month (as of April ’17).
Here’s to the next fourteen years!
