 My name is John Jacobi I'm the project lead for buddy press BB press One of the original founders of our camp Miami with David Bissett and everybody else ten years ago I'd no longer live in Miami, but happy to be back. I've been here every year for ten years super awesome This talk was originally like an hour and a half long. We're gonna do it in 15 minutes So if you want to be friends on Twitter get hub at JJJ My blog which is mostly pictures of my dog and rants about WordPress is JJJ out blog. Here we go This is what wordpress used to look like before it was wordpress 2003 this was B2 cafe log. There was no wordpress wordpress did not exist This website I think is still up and it still looks like this exactly the same as it did in 2003 Quotes from all sorts of all over the place so you can read them very quickly I'm gonna cruise through them because I think I have like 230 slides But you get the point blogging was kind of starting to be a thing people were starting to want a website for themselves Posting images and kind of going crazy trying to figure out how to do it. It wasn't real easy back in 2003 But by then The B2 software was kind of dormant the developer of it had kind of disappeared the project was still alive on Sourceforge, which is kind of like the old-school github, which some of you may remember But B2 had no activity the original author was gone And so what happened was Everyone got worried Everyone that was using B2 was like well, what am I gonna do with my blog? What is there's no software updates? I'm kind of out of luck And so Matt and Mike little Matt Malinwick Mike little Basically put out a comment in the B2 forums that said if you're serious about forking this and maintaining it. I'm with you Let's go do it together. Let's figure it out And that's essentially how WordPress was was born and this is what WordPress.org looked like Beautiful right elegant Apography amazing logo. Look at how gorgeous WordPress.org was in 2003, right? And eventually it got a little bit better It got dropshadows on the sides Sidebar eventually showed up man, we're evolving the web, right? It got longer and longer and eventually stuff started to move around a little bit Kind of crazy, but then we ended up with this style for a while on WordPress.org You can kind of watch it start to take shape a little bit. You can watch the styles change Look at where we started and then eventually where we ended up the images change the header images change that we've got very Grays, I learned that's a word grays. It's like beige, but gray This is everything's gray. You know different images And everything else I kind of stopped here because it kind of started to look the same I mean we have a new home page is kind of beautiful since word camp us last year But y'all can just go to wordpress.org and see that it's like nothing that's all that fascinating But the original version of WordPress was 0.72 which means very little right, but this is what we were working with back then You can kind of see pieces of it, right? Like if you think of WordPress like you're familiar with you see some stuff that kind of makes sense posts and edit and stuff is Kind of the same, but this is not the WordPress that you guys are installing today. This is a completely different thing And it dropped you straight into posts. There was no dashboard. There was no nothing like this was your WP admin This is what you saw and I think even originally like the rename happened, but for a long time we're like from that first version Everything was prefixed B2. It wasn't WP, right? so you bring the code over from B2 cafe log and The code was completely different. There's a whole big rename that happens and everything And this was the theme that WordPress came with you installed WordPress. This is what you got This was your blog Kind of a port from B2 with those a few little tweaks here and there But WordPress didn't really have themes support originally kind of nutty right like the economies are built entire communities businesses are built on WordPress themes at this point, but Originally it didn't have any of that functionality at all The WP admin continued to evolve we cleaned some things up We cut some stuff out note that there's still no visual editor yet. There's no tiny mce There's no Gutenberg. There's no anything fancy You had a text area and some buttons and that was what you did it made the bold tag for you revolutionary, right? and You know some things changed we had taxonomies tags we had categories some stuff started to get introduced But it's kind of ugly, right? This is not super cute in any way. That's still very grayish, but the theme was still the same nothing fancy by 1.5 though UX started to be a thing like people liked it, but hated it and complained about it a lot and so 1.5 was like the most user-centric release ever and This is what your dashboard look like. So there was nothing there But cleaned up the UI a lot. There's a like legitimate toolbar. They're starting to be the semblance of a navigation at the top And believe it or not even though it's kind of not the prettiest thing Adoption was like on the uprise like people actually liked using WordPress even though it was you know not real beautiful You can kind of see the pieces again start to fit together And this is when themes kind of started to be a thing in 1.5 You could pick a theme and you could install a theme and make WordPress look like this Kubrick does anybody remember this who remembers this? Okay Someone needs to make a Gutenberg version of this Wouldn't that wouldn't that be cool give me some retro Kubrick theme that's blocks and fancy. I don't know I still like it WordPress to 2005 It starts to be Designy a little bit there starts to be people contributing to the dashboard area And that's this is when blue kind of first came in to the whole thing The same but different blue All right, and believe it or not. I went through and installed every version of WordPress to get these screenshots It started from the beginning installed the next one install the next one install the next one We have a posts list where you can see all of your posts This is kind of the beginning of list tables So you can see where a table starts to look like we are used to today before that we didn't really have this The introduction of meta boxes that you're kind of familiar with now This is the first version of those collapsed boxes on the left place to write your posts in the middle and It starts to take shape a little bit. There's a preview instead of the visual editor So you can't really there's no visual editor, but you can preview what you've written in WP admin Which is kind of gone away. There's a post preview. It's different now, but you know, it's there and The custom fields met a metadata is the first time that you're able to see any of that stuff But so it's kind of hard to believe that none of this existed in the very beginning this is all stuff that had to get bolted on and The options panel now looks a little bit more like what we're familiar with it looks more like options kind of like we have today and The theme got screenshots so you can kind of see a preview of what it is that you're about to activate Which was you know before you just activated it and like oh, okay? I guess that's what my website looks like now here You have a screenshot to see what it is that you're about to do But we still had good ol Kubrick We did have the color picker so that you could pick the background color It was kind of the first theme related setting was being able to sight from sidebars, but being able to pick the gradient of your blue or orange was nice And then about 2006 is really when wordpress MU multi-site now and BB press Really started to become things that power to everything so Matt has famously said if he could rewrite wordpress from scratch it would look a lot like BB press Eventually we turn to BB press into a plug-in and all that really cool old code Which is still public if you want to find it we did abandon it all and we turn to BB press into a plug-in But there's old history and really cool stuff and the original version of BB press also BB press is our Bolton board Sister project to wordpress, which is what we use to power all of the support forums on wordpress.org But he pressed it or BB pressed it or all of the international forums iOS forums the Android app forums all of those are BB press They still use wordpress for you know site related things, but the forums themselves use BB press Bolton board BB press 2007 the admin finally got refreshed it looks no different to me, but apparently it got refreshed and But you did have a dashboard you did have a feed there was stuff starting to come alive in the dashboard for the first time and Everything else kind of looks the same to me a little bit more blue But kind of looks the same Post preview was an iFrame Embedded in the post so you could write your post embedded in here you'd see it live as you typed and it would refresh kind of neat Uploads media became a thing options looks the same Yeah, 2.3 kind of the same we're gonna keep cruising through because I've got five minutes left and Here is like the first actual WP admin redesign where it starts to look a little bit different flat colors contrast But still kind of you know this is when I think Word people started to take wordpress seriously. There's organization. There were structure pages posts plug-ins themes flexibility post preview Publishers could write long posts and see them as they were writing them previous to this none of that technology existed So it was kind of you know crazy times And you know there's picture of Paul the dog. He's pretty cute But you know you can kind of start to see it take shape with Cooperq was still the default theme back then same old thing same old thing 2.7 usability testing like actual usability testing Jen Milo did actual tests and said Everyone universally hates WP admin. No one can find anything. No one can publish anything eyes Can't find anything accessibility is not good. And so we ended up with This looks kind of familiar right menus are collapsible, but up and down not side to side We have an actual dashboard now with some counts some things some status updates of what it is that's in wordpress still very gray but you know Screen options became a thing Post rows list table became a thing Visual editor is for sure in and kind of high priority all over the editing experience We had a quick menu which has kind of gone away now that we have the admin bar Post revisions came in so this is what the original version of revisions looked like if you had Drafts and revisions and you're saving updates to posts. You actually had a side-by-side diff This is a little bit different now, but under the core of it is kind of still the same and more media still Kubrick though kind of theme preview looks a little bit nicer, but This was like a big deal in 2.7 This was like the time when people took wordpress actually seriously because the menus made more sense Things were more organized plug-ins made more sense They had places to live and wordpress kind of started to become super kind of useful for the first time in a while But for a while it continued to stay almost exactly the same revisions everything else mostly identical It wasn't until 2010 that we started getting new default themes. We had some Google Gears is in there for a while that eventually died and went away We had a big intro blob for like explaining what wordpress was and before we had the credits page and the about page but there are lots of things that changed like trying to make wordpress more user-friendly and Some of them were good and some of them weren't all that good But otherwise you can see that wordpress again stayed mostly the same. It was the intro to menus 2010 was kind of a crazy year Multi-site got merged in custom post types happened custom taxonomies Lots of activity WP admin had actual like lots of accessibility testing for Contrast issues for keyboard users for non mouse users and on and on and on and on and on so WP admin Huge leaps forward for a lot to different audiences And this is the first time that we had a different default theme 2010 and from then on the naming conventions 11 12 and so on But it was kind of nice to have a refreshed Menu based theme because you could kind of start moving stuff around in a way that you weren't able to before and Come 3.1 Things got to be mostly the same But I'm gonna bounce ahead on my last minute. This is my favorite Design of wordpress personally. I don't know why just speaks to me in some way I like the flatness, but I like the lines. I like the contrast. This is probably my favorite one simple shortcut menu is nice 2013 theme that's kind of nuts, right? I guess I'll just pound right through all of this because you'll get the idea Until we eventually media media library is a critical point this has kind of stayed the same since media went in in 3.5 and Let's go to I'm gonna skip ahead to the this looks familiar, right? This is like the wordpress. You all know This is where we're pretty much at today, but it took us 15 years to get here Is kind of the point of my of this entire talk? there's a gentleman by the name of George Cordis that in 2013 or 14 came up with some flatter neater Transparency future ideas for what WP admin might look like. I thought it was really nice and kind of well thought out it looked pretty clever and Wordpressy to me, so I included these here as like think of where we could go eventually we're focusing on Gutenberg and crazy editing stuff like that's fine, but I kind of thought this was nice and That's it 15 minutes done Lightning talk not kidding rip through it all