WordPress’ Eighth Birthday

Today is WordPress’ offi­cial eighth birth­day (the anniversary of the first release).

I still mar­vel at the incred­ible dis­tance it has come. I’m also still proud that I had a part in its birth. But even more, I mar­vel at the won­der­ful con­tri­bu­tion of all the WordPress com­munity make to this fant­astic project.

A cli­ent said to me this morn­ing “This WordPress is bril­liant isn’t it?” As I helped him set up his fourth WordPress site. You can’t get much clearer praise than that.

So raise a vir­tual beer (or other non-alcoholic bever­age if, like me, you are tee­total) to WordPress, the com­munity, and to another year.

Update: I just spot­ted this tweet from Andrew Nacin:

At more than 20 mil­lion WordPress.com blogs, that puts WordPress at north of 45 mil­lion sites. Wowza. Happy birth­day indeed.
@nacin
Andrew Nacin

Wow! 25 mil­lion stan­dalone WordPress sites plus 20 mil­lion WordPress.com sites! No won­der it powers more than 14 per­cent of the web.

WordPress — 8 Years in the making

Wow! Another year has passed and it is now eight years since my fate­ful com­ment on Matt’s blog that kicked off this whole WordPress thing!

WordPress is now a mature CMS plat­form driv­ing 13% of the web! It is used for an aston­ish­ing array of very dif­fer­ent web sites around the world, from the humblest one per­son blog to award-winning edu­ca­tion sites, celebrity sites, news­pa­pers, and even world lead­ers!

WordPress is sup­port­ing a whole industry of WordPress experts, includ­ing me: I’m now in my third year as an inde­pend­ent WordPress spe­cial­ist.

I believe that WordPress has achieved this massive suc­cess in no small way because of the fant­astic com­munity around it, the keen-eyed vis­ion of Matt Mul­len­weg, and the awe­some power of the GNU GPL open source license.

With ver­sion 3.1 just around the corner, I pre­dict it will be another great year for WordPress.