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History of WordPress

Overview​

According to information from WordPress.org, WordPress is the successor to a blogging tool developed by French programmer - Michel Valdrighi named b2/cafelog, which was first launched in 2001 and ceased development a year later.

In January 2003, two users of b2/cafelog, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, decided to build a new platform based on it. That year, Matt Mullenweg was only 19 years old, a first-year college student.

On May 27, 2003, the first official WordPress version (0.7) was released.

Others soon joined Mullenweg and Little, including b2/cafelog's originator, Valdrighi. In April 2004, along with co-developer Dougal Campbell, the WordPress development team launched a hub to help notify search engines about new blog posts and updates, called Ping -O-Matic.

In May 2004, one of WordPress's main competitors, Movable Type, announced a radical change in their pricing structure, due to that added significant "fuel" to the WordPress "fire" with thousands of users leaving the platform to switch to WordPress.

Since then, there have been more than 75 million websites using the WordPress platform, including world-famous websites such as: Coca Cola, CNN, BBC America, Sony Music, MTV News,...

Versions of WordPress​

WordPress's core developers share a love of jazz music, and all major WordPress releases are named in honor of jazz musicians they admire. Currently, every few months, WordPress releases a new version.

You can see details all WordPress releases at WordPress.org.

In this article, we will only mention some outstanding versions that bring major changes to WordPress.

  • WordPress 1.2

    • Support Plugins

  • WordPress 1.5

    • Support Pages and Themes

  • WordPress 2.0

    • Admin Dashboard
    • WYSIWYG Editor

  • WordPress 2.3

    • Support Tags

  • WordPress 3.0

    • New Menu System
    • Multi-site
    • Custom Post Type and Custom Taxonomy.

  • WordPress 4.4

    • Hỗ trợ REST API, Term Metadata and Responsive Images.

  • WordPress 5.0

    • Block Editor: Gutenberg Editor

  • WordPress 5.6

    • Improve Block Editor
    • Support PHP 8

  • WordPress 6.0

The future of WordPress​

WordPress has benefited millions of users globally. Thousands of developers, designers, writers, bloggers and web publishers have been making a living through it.

With over 59,550 plugins and 11,720 themes available on the library, WordPress has truly gone beyond a basic CMS – It is a system capable of providing a wide range of features for many different purposes.

What will the future of WordPress look like? Well, the best way to answer this question is probably to listen to what Matt Mullenweg had to say: “I see the future of WordPress as a web operating system”. WordPress is only limited by the imagination of those who use and develop it, and human imagination has no limits, So WordPress really has a very bright and limitless future.

References​