WordPress ~ Per Aspera ad Astra

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

A Little History

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPLv2 (or later). 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.

What You Can Use WordPress For

WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins and widgets and themes, WordPress is limited only by your imagination.

Key developers

Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little were cofounders of the project. The core lead developers include Helen Hou-Sandí, Dion Hulse, Mark Jaquith, Matt Mullenweg, Andrew Ozz, and Andrew Nacin. WordPress is also developed by its community, including WP testers, a group of volunteers who test each release. They have early access to nightly builds, beta versions and release candidates. Errors are documented in a special mailing list, or the project’s Trac tool.

Though largely developed by the community surrounding it, WordPress is closely associated with Automattic, the company founded by Matt Mullenweg. On September 9, 2010, Automattic handed the WordPress trademark to the newly created WordPress Foundation, which is an umbrella organization supporting WordPress.org (including the software and archives for plugins and themes), bbPress and BuddyPress.

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 modern software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope that by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.

2001 – b2 cafelog launched by Michel Valdrighi.

2003 – Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little fork b2 and create WordPress.

2004 – Plugins are introduced with Version 1.2 (Mingus).

2005 – Theme system and static pages are introduced with Version 1.5 (Strayhorn), followed by persistent caching, a new user role system, and a new backend UI in Version 2.0 (Duke).

2007 – A new UI, autosave, spell check and other new features were introduced in Version 2.1 (Ella). Widgets, better Atom feed support, and speed optimizations came out in Version 2.2 (Getz). And tagging, update notifications, pretty URLs and a new taxonomy system were introduced in Version 2.3 (Dexter).

2008 – Version 2.5 (Brecker) was released with a new administration UI design by Happy Cog, and introduced the dashboard widget system and the shortcode API. Version 2.6 (Tyner) built on 2.5 and introduced post revisions and Press This. A usability study was done on 2.5 over the summer, leading to the development of the Crazyhorse prototype, and the eventual release of Version 2.7 (Coltrane), which redesigned the administration UI to improve usability and make the admin tool more customizable. Version 2.7 also introduced automatic upgrading, built-in plugin installation, sticky posts, comment threading/paging/replies and a new API, bulk management, and inline documentation.

2009 – Version 2.8 (Baker) introduced a built-in theme installer and an improved widget UI and API. Version 2.9 (Carmen) introduced image editing, a Trash/Undo feature, bulk plugin updating, and oEmbed support.

2010 – Version 3.0 (Thelonious) was a major release, it introduced custom post types, made custom taxonomies simpler, added custom menu management, added new API’s for custom headers and custom backgrounds, introduced a new default theme called “Twenty Ten” and allowed the management of multiple sites (called MultiSite).

2011 – Version 3.1 (Gershwin) introduced post format and the admin bar. Version 3.2 (Reinhardt) made WordPress faster and lighter, this version upgraded minimum requirements to PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.15, and introduced a new default theme called “Twenty Eleven”. Version 3.3 (Sonny) made WordPress more friendly for beginners with welcome messages and feature pointers.

2012 – Version 3.4 (Green) introduced the theme customizer and theme previewer. Version 3.5 (Elvin) introduced the new media manager and the new default theme called “Twenty Twelve”.

2013 – Version 3.6 (Peterson) introduced a new default theme called “Twenty Thirteen”, builtin Audio and Video support, dynamic and scalable Revisions, improved Autosave and Post Locking. Version 3.7 (Basie) introduced automatic updates for maintenance and security updates, stronger password meter, improved search results and better global support for localized versions. Version 3.8 (Parker) introduced new admin design and new default theme called “Twenty Fourteen”.

2014 – Version 3.9 (Smith) improved the media experience and introduced live widget and header previews. Version 4.0 (Benny) introduced a grid view for the media library and for installing plugins, and visual previews for embedded content. Version 4.1 (Dinah) introduced a refreshed Distraction Free Writing mode, language installation from the Settings screen, and a beautiful new default theme, “Twenty Fifteen”.

2015 – Version 4.2 (Powell) added emoji support, add extended character support and switched database encoding from utf8 to utf8mb4. Version 4.3 (Billie) added builtin site icons support and introduced formatting shortcuts in the visual editor. Version 4.4 (Clifford) added responsive images, embeddable posts, and a new default theme, “Twenty Sixteen.”

2016 – Version 4.5 (Coleman) added inline links, added formatting shortcuts and responsive previews in Customizer.

How to start using WordPress?

All hosting plans with Connect 2u2 include full support and professional services (on demand) for all Connect 2u2 clients. To start using WordPress CMS, sign-up with any of the available hosting plans and install WordPress from your Control Panel. At Connect we are specialised in WordPress. For all business clients we provide highly specialised services. Contact us for more information.