WordPress will be turning 11 soon, but tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of when I first tried it out. My original blog post is no longer available, but via the wayback machine I found my first post about WordPress, on May 24, 2004.
With all of the talk about Movable Type’s new licensing scheme, there’s been a lot of talk about other blogging options. After reading a lengthy thread on SlashDot, I decided to give WordPress a try. The main reasons for that was because it was rather highly recommended by a number of people, and it’s in PHP. Being in PHP, it’ll be easier for me to apply hacks and upgrades to the system.
I’ve already installed two hacks (sort of combined into one) that help a great deal. It’s taken a bit of work to get them to play together nicely. I took the WYSI-WordPress hack (which makes the blog editing tool a WYSIWYG editor – instead of using bold and italic “tags”, I can just make things bold and italic, like in MS Word). However, I’ve used htmlArea before (which is what powers that hack), and I know it has a cool image upload hack itself. So, I downloaded the ImageManager hack for htmlArea and spent about an hour trying to get those to work together. Now I can upload (and edit) images while typing a post and they show up right along with the text. It’s great!
I was hacking it up from day one! Admittedly, WordPress needed quite a bit of hacking in those early days because it was quite rudimentary. It’s been fun watching it grow over the past decade, and here are a few of the big milestones we’ve seen:
- February, 2005 – Version 1.5 – This release was huge and added the main theme system for WordPress, along with the ability to create static pages (and not just “posts”).
- December, 2005 – Version 2.0 – Redesigned back end, and the first release of the visual editor. Prior to this update, you had to use HTML to write your posts (or hack it up as I did above).
- May 2007 – Version 2.2 – This is where the concept of widgets was first introduced.
- July, 2008 – Version 2.6 – They added post revisions, theme previews, image captions and a variety of useful little updates.
- December, 2012 – Version 3.5 – A slick new media management system was added.
- December, 2013 – Version 3.8 – They redesigned the admin panel again, to the new dark theme that we’re all familiar with.
Those are just some of the highlights of the 94 different versions of WordPress that have been released in the past 11 years. This page will show you the full list, including details on each release. Here’s to 10 more great years!
When did you first give WordPress a try?
