WordPress, the blogging and content management system, is 10-years old today.
The platform has evolved in the past decade from being a basic blogging service to something that has helped people and brands become more social and changed how we communicate on the Web.
By Ken Yeung
Started by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, WordPress is an open source service where anyone can make modifications to the code to improve their blog and make it something that works for them.
Bloggers who use WordPress are able to apply design themes to their sites while also integrating third-party plugins easily. Since it’s open source software, there isn’t a need for an approval process before someone can implement a new feature.
As of this writing, the latest version of WordPress has been downloaded more than 21 million times.
Has it already been a decade?
For Mullenweg, hitting the decade mark was a bit startling for him. In a blog post, he waxed nostalgia about the platform he helped create:
Has it really been 10 years? It seems just yesterday we were playing around on my blog, and the blogs of a few high school friends. Two of those friends are married, one isn’t anymore, two are still figuring things out, and one has passed away.
You were cute before you became beautiful. Wearing black and white, afraid of color, trying to be so unassuming. I know you got jealous when I wore those Blogger t-shirts. They were the cool kids at SxSW and I thought maybe you could grow up to be like them.
You wouldn’t have shirts of your own for a few more years. We didn’t know what we were doing when we made them and the logo printed ginormous. People called them the Superman shirt and made fun of them. But, oh, that logo — the curves fit you so well.
WordPress emerged onto the scene when users had the option of posting their thoughts on services like Xanga, LiveJournal, MySpace, and Blogger. One difference between all of these other systems and WordPress was the option for users to simply download the platform and install it right onto their own servers. With this self-hosted model, Mullenweg managed to help make it more accessible and flexible for not only users, but for businesses who wanted more control.
Taking WordPress on the road
Today, an ecosystem has sprouted up around WordPress and Mullenweg has taken his show on the road, holding WordCamp developer conferences in cities around the world. It all culminates with a meeting in San Francisco where he gives his annual “State of the Word” address and shares some insights about where the product has gone and about the community as a whole.
Here’s 2012′s State of the Word
In his most recent “State of the Word’ address, Mullenweg said that in 2006, there was only one WordCamp. Five years later, it grew to 52 events and last year, there were 75, with more than 10,000 attendees. He calls the conference phenomena something that he’s “very proud of and happy about.”
Watch it here:
I attended WordCamp San Francisco in 2009 and the room was packed with aficionados, including someone who traveled all the way to the conference to show off his WordPress tattoo.
Scaling WordPress
As we alluded to before, WordPress has become much more than just a blogging service, but rather a platform on which entire businesses are built on, including The Next Web, CNN, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Dow Jones,UPS, NBC Sports, TED, and many others.
In the above image, Mullenweg broke down where many of WordPress’s users are coming from. It has grown so large that the service added VIP hosting for those companies who need managed services. This, in turn, has spawned a new group of companies seeking to capitalize on user needs.
Services like Page.ly and WP Engine have sprouted up to offer third-party hosting for businesses who want an alternative besides WordPress’s VIP option — with the latter being perhaps the first WordPress-focused service to go public soon.
Today, Royal Pingdom estimates that WordPress has 52 percent of the Top 100 blog market share on the Internet. This number dwarfs other platforms like Drupal, Gawker, BlogSmith, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger, Joomla, and Tumblr.
WordPress says that it now powers more than 66 million sites, written in over 120 languages. What’s more, Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, says that more than 368 million people view 4.1 billion pages each month on WordPress.com, its free blog-hosting solution.
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