5 Years of WordPress

By: Sophia Lucero | May 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment

On May 27, 2003, the first version of WordPress was announced. Today, after 5 years of releases, currently at milestone 2.5 going on 2.6, it’s arguably the most versatile and most popular blogging platform out there.

From b2 to WP

We all have our blog birthdays but how about celebrating our favorite blog software’s birthday? Here’s a little tidbit for those who aren’t familiar with how WordPress came to be:

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.

Timeline

It’s been a long road from the early days of WordPress starting out as a fork in b2/cafelog’s development. Here’s a rundown of WordPress highlights over the years:

2003
May: WordPress announced as official b2 branch
May: WordPress 0.7 (first release)

2004
Jan: WordPress 1.0
Jan: WordPress 1.0.1 “Miles”
Mar: WordPress 1.0.2 “Blakey”
Apr: Ping-o-Matic
May: WordPress 1.2 “Mingus”
Dec: bbPress

2005
Feb: WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn”
Feb: Kubrick
Aug: Automattic
Oct: Akismet
Dec: WordPress 2.0 “Duke”

2006
Jan: WordPress 2.0.1
Mar: WordPress Widgets
Jul: WordCamp San Francisco
Aug: WordPress.com
Oct: WordPress MU 1.0
Oct: WordPress 2.0.5 “Ronan”

2007
Jan: WordPress 2.1 “Ella”
May: WordPress 2.2 “Getz”
Sep: WordPress 2.3 “Dexter”

2008
Mar: WordPress 2.5 “Brecker” (2.4 skipped)
Sep: WordCamp Philippines!

More Reminiscing

And now for more posts that stroll down the memory lane of WordPress achievements:

History of WordPress Series: Part 1: Detailed summary of what each WordPress version accomplished.
Happy 5th Birthday WordPress!: All those “remember when?”s show how far WP has come along.
WordPress 0.7 five years ago: Text is in Israeli but the pictures say enough.

Here’s to even more success: happy birthday, WordPress! So who else is having a party?

Tags: wordpress

3 Comments

wilson ng Said,

May 27, 2008 @ 9:45 am

I’ve been using wordpress for some years, and may it continue to gain from strength to strength.

wilson ngs last blog post..How do you Know YOu’re Not Stupid?
Ran Yaniv Hartstein Said,

June 2, 2008 @ 3:05 pm

Thanks for the links. Just a small clarification - the language spoken in Israel is Hebrew.

Ran Yaniv Hartsteins last blog post..??????? ???????
The History of WordPress according to John Cow | WordPress Philippines Said,

September 2, 2008 @ 3:37 pm

[...] Cow gives a rundown of WordPress through the years. I’ve written about this before, but in this post, Cow links all the major milestones with technology and current events that [...]