WordPress 0.7 was the first official version of WordPress, released on May 27, 2003. Yeah, we are celebrating 20 years of WordPress. Twenty Years. Incredible. Happy Birthday, WordPress, and we wish you many more!
Writing about WordPress and its 20 years of history is very hard. WordPress has come a long way from the small form of the B2 blogging script to the monster publishing platform that powers 43% of the internet (63% among the websites powered by CMS software). That is quite insane and very hard to believe, but it is true.
I am not going to go through the history of WordPress; there are so many in-depth articles on the internet dissecting everything that happened in the past 20 years. But, I would like to go back to 2007 and my first experience with WordPress. I have taken out my old development archives recorded on DVD disks, and I managed to find disks from 2007 and 2008. My first WordPress release was version 2.2, released in May 2007. The highlight of that version was the integration of Widgets into WordPress Core. At that time, early implementation of the rich TinyMCE editor was already in the core since version 2.0.
Before I started using WordPress, I tested different CMS systems that were available then, and I especially liked Joomla. The most important thing about choosing WordPress was related to the plugin development, and when I tried to create a Joomla plugin, that proved to be very difficult and convoluted. I spent a few days with Joomla trying to develop a basic plugin to add some small things, and I was very frustrated. Then, I tried WordPress. WordPress interface was not as polished as Joomla was, and Joomla had a lot more features, but creating a plugin with WordPress was so easy and fast that in a few days, I had already made 3 small plugins to add some things I needed at the time.
In early 2008, I started working on a WordPress-powered website for a friend, and that website needed star ratings, so I made the plugin that was my first plugin hosted in the WordPress.org repository: GD Star Rating. GD Press Tools came later that year with a few more plugins. At that time, I was already working as a freelancer on WordPress projects, and finally, in 2009, I quit my job (C# and MS SQL) and started working with WordPress exclusively to this day, WordPress development is 100% of my work.
WordPress has changed my life for the better, and 15-16 years later, I am still deep into the WordPress world and WordPress development, always learning new stuff and expanding what the plugins can do to enhance and improve WordPress. I don’t always agree with WordPress’s direction with every new major version, but I try to adjust, learn, and take what I can to improve my plugins and the work I do for others.
WordPress is 20 years young, with a lot more room to grow and I am ready to see what the next 20 years will bring us. Happy Birthday WP!
So, to celebrate the 20 Years of WordPress, we have a 20% discount promotion for 20 days for all Dev4Press plugins and club licenses. The discount is applied automatically, but you can use the discount code directly. Check out more on the promotion page.
