 moment here. All right, everyone, welcome. You're here today for a brief history WordPress. This is kind of a fun idea I had for a workshop, also based on some materials that we have on learn.wordpress.org. I thought it'd be cool to have a workshop based on that. And just to give you all some insight on the birth of WordPress in some of the early days. So as folks are filing in, I'd like to ask some questions of you so you can answer in the chat in the Zoom. You can find that usually at the bottom of the Zoom window, there's chat button there. So please feel free to answer these questions in the chat. Where are you joining us from today? What do you do with WordPress? And I'm curious how long you've been using WordPress because mostly to see how long folks have been using it through the history of WordPress. So yeah, so I see some answers coming in. Welcome to Bob in Connecticut. Mike in the Pacific Northwest, been using for 15 years. Awesome. Great. You might be aware of some of this history, but I hope you learned something new today. Neil from California. Robert's been using WordPress for less than one year. Welcome. myself. My name is Courtney and I am based in Hawaii in the US and I've been using WordPress since 2004. I started as a blogger, so which is what WordPress started as and you'll learn that somewhere about that shortly. And I do a lot of things with WordPress, but most recently I'm employed by Automatic and they sponsor me to contribute full time to the WordPress open source project. Let me see. We have, let's see, Dan from Washington started working with WordPress about two years ago. Amy from Ireland. Good evening. Or yes, I believe it's still evening there. I've been using it for over a year. Great. So we have a wide variety of folks joining us. So welcome. And I'm letting a few folks in from the waiting room. If you're just joining us, so we're just answering these questions in the chat to get a sense of our audience. So welcome. I'm going to go ahead and get started with our content, seeing that we're about five minutes in. If you've never attended an online workshop before, welcome. These online workshops are where we learn together as a community. So you can ask questions in the chat at any time or contribute to the conversation if you have something to share. Feel free to type in the chat at any time. This and other online workshops are recorded, as I mentioned, and then we upload these to WordPress.tv. So you can find an archive of online workshops there. You can also find some WordPress video tutorials over at learn.wordpress.org. So that's where we have all our educational materials. And lastly, I like to mention that online workshops are hosted by folks that enjoy WordPress and giving back to the community. So not just sponsored folks like myself, but folks all over the globe that volunteer their time and they enjoy using WordPress, they enjoy giving back to the community. So if you have a WordPress-related topic that you're interested in, I would love to help you host one of these workshops and I can guide you through the process. So if you are interested in that, please reach out. I'd be happy to help. Okay, so what we'll be talking about today is the history of WordPress, of course. So it will cover the six major milestones of WordPress, which includes the prehistory of WordPress, the conception of and the original contributors to WordPress, the introduction of hooks, plugins and themes, the founding of automatic, the introduction of the modern dashboard that we see today and the evolution of becoming a content management system, which we refer to as a CMS in this presentation and elsewhere. To be clear, what we won't be covering today is installing and using WordPress. That kind of goes without saying, but we do have plenty of other workshops and learning material about installing and using WordPress. And if you're interested in that, I can share that later, but you can also find it at learn.wordpress.org. Maybe we have a few more folks joining us. Welcome. All right, so let's get started. So before WordPress, there was a concept of the online diary, which folks were calling a web blog or a blog. So this started as early as the 90s. And at that time, skills in web programming were needed to publish one's content to the web. And so here, the screenshot that I'm sharing, you can see the posts that started this all. So a French blogger named Michel Baldrigui announced that he was working on a PHP and MySQL alternative to blogger and brain matter. So blogger and brain matter were blog platforms at that time. So a fun fact is that Michel named his new blogging software B2 Cafe Log, which was inspired by the popular rock song at the time. That was called Song 2 by the band Blur. And so that's how he got B2. It was like blog 2 shortened to B2. So there's your fun fact for this era. So Michel announced that features included in this software would include many of the ones you see in WordPress now. This includes a built-in comment system, good user management, user avatars, and multiple ways of archiving. And notably, the software could be installed on a hosting platform by making small edits to a config file and then running an installation script. So that's which is very similar to the famous five-minute install. Most notably of all, Michel made the decision to license B2 under the GNU public license, aka the GPL. So this means that the code could be modified by anyone. So in 2002, B2 was growing in popularity, but Michel stopped maintaining the project or even responding to communications because life happens. He's just one person. So in 2003, Matt Mullenweg writes this blog post entitled The Blogging Software Dilemma. In this post, he laments that Michel has been missing from the development community and he worries about his safety. And Matt also speculates about the future, concerned about, among other things, forward compatibility, features and flexibility and licensing that he can politically support, oh, and also ease of installation. So Matt proposes a fork of B2 since it is licensed under the GPL and is free software. So if you haven't heard the term fork before, that means like taking the code from one piece of software and turning it into another piece of software in simple terms. So following day after this post, Matt received a comment from Mike Little, who is a fellow blogger from Stockport, England. So across the world from Matt, so Mike indicated that if Matt was serious about his intent to fork B2, he was willing to contribute. And after that, Matt and Mike submit over like 100 commits between April 1 and May 27, 2003. So Matt Mullenweg is known for creating repress, but his love of jazz and haiku poetry still survive into modern day code. So this is a little haiku that we wrote. So that was written. So they found each other to build a community and called it WordPress. So this is a nice summary haiku of the founding of WordPress. So major releases of WordPress, going back to Matt's love of jazz and poetry, major releases of WordPress are still nicknamed after jazz musicians. And the phrase that you'll see around that says code is poetry, you'll see that used a lot in the community and it remains the mantra for WordPress developers. So on May 22, 2003, Matt updated his blog with a post called that was titled Woe WordPress. In it, he says that WordPress will be released very, very soon. So five days later, May 27, 2003, WordPress 0.7 is released. This is what it looked like on the front end. So it featured a 300% performance boost over B2, which is awesome. So two days after this release, Donica Hoquiv agrees to work together with Matt and Mike to merge his fork, which was called B2++. So he agreed to merge that with WordPress. That becomes known as WPMU. So the WordPress community begins to form with these folks. And as communications channels are set up in the form of IRC chat, WordPress.org, WordPress docs and the WordPress wiki. But already factions begin to form between developers and users who utilize the software without development knowledge. So and did that show up? Yes. On May 27, that was, yeah, that was 0.7. And in January 2004, WordPress, one point of Davis is launched, which is named for the famous jazz trumpet or metals Davis. There's your jazz musician for that version. So later that year, there was the popular blogging platform called movable type. And they changed their license and pricing structure, which unfortunately was to the dismay of thousands of bloggers, including myself, who had relied on its free, free model. And this is when I started exploring and using WordPress. So I guess I did start using it like early 2004. So as a result of this, WordPress downloads more than double. And it grows from 8,670 active installations in April 2004 to 19,400 in May, which is huge. And next, WordPress 1.2, nicknamed Mingus, launches in May 2004. So it launches with numerous improvements, including hooks and filters. So this is when, yeah, those were introduced. So that provided extensible framework for plugins and themes. Language international, internationalization is introduced. So that contributes to a worldwide adoption. And then next, a plugin that's called Hello Dolly, you'll probably see this in your fresh WordPress installs. That was started to be included in core downloads. So the fun fact here is that this was a tribute to Louis Armstrong. But it was also a demonstration of the power to use hooks and filters to modify WordPress. Shortly after, a developer named Ryan Boran, he begins to contribute to the project. But not only with code, he also contributes development strategy. And in late December of 2004, Matt is stuck in San Francisco, California over the Christmas holiday. And during this downtime, he writes the original source for BD Press. And this becomes the infrastructure for the WordPress support forums. All right, so next in February 2005, another leap for WordPress occurs with the release of 1.5, nicknamed Strayhorn. Strayhorn introduced the capability for users to install themes. And it came bundled with the default theme called Kubrick, which is what you see here. One thing that always just sticks out to me on this screenshot is that the P in WordPress is not capitalized. But it's part of history now. So by the next month after Strayhorn was released, the downloads of WordPress tripled to over 100,000. And Matt held a party that he nicknamed the 100K Party in San Francisco. And fun fact, I was there. And that was kind of an interesting time to see, like, and then we saw the numbers roll over to 100,000. So at this party, Matt asked a fellow named Jonas Lester to join the development team. And he technically becomes the first paid employee of what at the time Matt was calling WordPress Inc. Incorporated. Looks like we have another high queue for y'all. Principles designed on true usability for every person. Of course, like many open source projects WordPress is still a hobby for first developers. You know, most of them have full-time jobs and work on WordPress on the side or in their free time. So, you know, knowing that a project cannot survive as a side project, Matt begins to think about ways to make a living through WordPress. So at first, Matt turns to hosting paid articles in WordPress.org, which, you know, was an experiment. But the community pushed back on this because they felt like it was turning WordPress.org into a link farm. And they took it as a sign that the monetization of WordPress was not going to be done in an ethical way. So the community revolted. It also learned that the news that interrupted Matt's first vacation since starting the project. This was all happening, you know, when he was on vacation. And most folks were reserving judgment until he's had a chance to respond. But this was basically like the first kind of controversy in the WordPress community. So responding to the criticism, Matt and Donica became rapidly developing WordPress.com, which is a hosted version of WordPress. So they started developing that with WPMU and they opened it first as an invitation-only blog hosting platform. Next, Matt attended a conference on spam beyond the inbox, which shapes his thinking as he designs the plugin called Akismet. So he releases this plugin free of cost to non-commercial blogs and asks that commercial sites pay to license it. The release of Akismet also coincides with the establishment of automatic and more developers are hired under that company. And as a more clear path towards self-sufficiency is determined, the separation of WordPress.org from automatic is established. And Matt commits to keeping the open source project free and free of cost. When we say free and free of cost, when my first version of free is what we say is like free in freedom versus free as in beer, this is like one of the constant threads of discussion throughout the history of open source software. So Matt had responded to criticism of the paid articles, the whole paid articles thing. He responded to it with transparency and honesty. He had posted to the community that his options to fund the project, which so far had been out of his own pocket were limited. And he made the decision to turn down venture capital and turned on offers to buy WordPress. So he was also opposed to ruining the user experience by adding a call for donations in the dashboard. So there's a long going effort to keep WordPress free and free of cost. More haiku it looks like what we have. Committers and themes, balance day job with passion, the company farms. So during the next two years WordPress struggles and grows into maturity. Matt introduces word camps. So these are larger conferences where the community can come together face to face. We still have those to this day. The plugin directory is established in these years. Developers established a release schedule and same versioning numbers. User experience data is gathered sometimes from negative feedback to new features and interfaces. The taxonomies of tags and categories are introduced. Theme developers begin monetizing their work via links back to their own websites. And a new admin interface is introduced but Garner's negative feedback from the community. I'll be going over that in a second. I see a question from Robert. Is Matt's name there the reason there are two T's and automatic? I believe that is correct. I've heard folks have other theories. I don't remember exactly what it was, but that's yes. The two T's and Matt's are the two T's and automatic. I'm just taking a break just to look at the chat. Thank you for your feedback, Linda. Dan says we WordPress users owe a lot to the founders and developers who upheld a fantastic and all embracing philosophy to share freely and work together to push things forward. 100%. So there's a talking point here that's... Linda says her comment was a haiku. I did not even think about that. That's fantastic. So talking point here is more philosophical and ethical debates took place during this era of WordPress's evolution. Everything from the support forums to development strategy to inline documentation was a hot button issue. One of the most famous examples was what was called the capital P, dang it, issue in which the code automatically changed the P in WordPress to a capital letter. It's like whatever I see that lowercase few just sticks out like a sore thumb. But this may seem like a trivial change, but the community responded with ethical arguments that changing a user's speech amounted to a crime against freedom. So yeah, to this day, that's a little bit of a hot topic. All right. So the WordPress 2.7 in December 2008. There are huge improvements in here, which included the widget system and the short code API, which were both introduced with 2.7. Several projects try and fail to improve the dashboard user experience. So the modern dashboard is what was introduced in 2.7. After several attempts to redesign the dashboard, they codenamed this project Crazy Horse based and they based it on extensive user testing. And in July, the WordPress theme directory is launched. In December, the WordPress theme directory clarifies its acceptance procedure specifying only that GPL licensed themes will be allowed. Jumping forward a bit. In June of 2010, WordPress 3.0 codenamed Monk was released with several new features, including emerging with WPMU, which is now known as Multisite. The theme called 2010, which looked like this, was also released. There's that lowercase P again. And it now includes navigation menus, which provide the tools to deliver a real content management system. And it brings WordPress into its modern form. I still see quite a few sites with the 2010 theme, actually. All right. So it's taken WordPress the better part of a decade to get it from its humble beginnings of just an idea just used by a few people to where it is today as a CMS that powers, I don't know, I think at this point it's like 43% plus of websites on the Internet run on WordPress. I did not reveal our height. Let's see. Crazy Horse tests best. Please embrace the GPL. Free access for all. So many people have worked on the WordPress project and the project continues to evolve. So it's of course going to be interesting to see what's in store for WordPress in the years to come. Of course, don't have the time to go through every iteration of WordPress, but I thought that I'm sharing the early days of WordPress would at least be informative on the roots of the software we know and love today. If you'd like to learn more about the history of WordPress, there's actually a book that has been in progress and it is completely on GitHub right now and you can you can read it. People are also working on it together there and update the content as it goes long. I have no idea if and when it will be published as like a book, but it is constantly evolving. So you can find that at github.com slash WordPress slash book and on WordPress.org there's like the full history. So WordPress.org slash support slash article slash history that's constantly updated with every single version of WordPress. So recommend checking that out if you're interested. Looks like I motor through our content pretty quickly. So that's the end of my content that I have. Does anyone have any questions or anecdotes that you like to share from maybe your early days with WordPress? Linda says I'm sure the pandemic will be included in the next history of WordPress in about 10 years. Oh yes. Absolutely. I believe the official birthday of WordPress is the May 27, 2004 date which is always right around holiday in the U.S. I think it's Memorial Day and almost every year the WordPress community gets together and has celebrations all over the world. There is a nice worldwide effort for WordPress meetup groups to have 15th birthday parties a few years ago. So that was pretty cool. But we're looking forward to the 20th anniversary actually in a couple years. So we have no questions. Yeah. So that's it for the history of WordPress. Thank you for being here. And yeah, I hope that you learned something new about WordPress. And yeah, thank you. I see Linda comments. This was very interesting. Great. I'm glad to hear it. Dan says this has been terrifically motivating. I admire the underlying principles that support WordPress. Many other institutions could take an example. Yeah, I agree. I'm a big fan of open source software and the principles behind it. And I actually hope to do some workshops in the future about open source. So hope to see you then. We'll see you next time. So if you liked the content in this workshop, I will be doing this same workshop again next week at an earlier time to maybe hit maybe our colleagues in Europe and maybe the East Coast in the U.S. So keep an eye out for that and please do share that. You can join more online workshops and you can watch video tutorials about using WordPress at learn.wordpress.org. And you can join our conversations on the making WordPress Slack, which is at chat.wordpress.org. Something I did not mention is that I can also be reached on Twitter if you want to chat about maybe having your own online workshops or maybe creating one for your local WordPress meetup. I can be found on Twitter at cpk underscore WP on Twitter. And thanks again for everyone for being here. And I will see you next time. Cheers.