WordPress turned eighteen on May 27 🎂
Matt Mullenweg shared some thoughts this week about the pivotal time WordPress has reached. On the occasion of its eighteenth birthday, he wrote:
“I consider myself so lucky to have co-founded the project alongside Mike Little… I blogged these anniversaries when WordPress was five, ten, fifteen, and last year at seventeen, but as the project reaches an age that, if it were a child, it would be heading off to college.”
At WP.org you can read the post that started it all. You can also review 40 key milestones that “helped shape WordPress through the years.” On Twitter, many people celebrated by sharing photos of themselves 18 years ago. I shared the schedule and photos of the first WordCamp in San Francisco that Matt linked to in his post.
Eighteen years is quite a milestone for a human being, but it’s an incredible length of time for web software. Even for those who got into WordPress only a few years ago much has changed. Who would have thought we’d reach a 41%+ marketshare valued in billions of dollars just shy of the two-decade mark?
Many of the key milestones are obvious. Here are three less known moments from my early WordPress days:
- Kubrick Theme – This clean blue blogging theme by Michael Heilemann was popular when WordPress first started to gain serious traction. It went into core in 2005. Kubrick seemed to be everywhere before yearly default themes became a thing in 2010. I’ll never forget it; it’s burned into my memory. 🎨
- WordPress Multisite – Who remembers when this was a separate download/product that was a pain to configure and set up? But once it worked it was amazing — for its time. Today it’s taken for granted. 🤹♂️
- The Trojan Emoji – A security fix was included in WordPress core under the guise of emoji support. Here’s a Post Status summary. 🕵️♂️
Onward and upward to 19!
