WordPress’ Eighth Birthday

Today is WordPress’ official eighth birthday (the anniversary of the first release).

I still marvel at the incredible distance it has come. I’m also still proud that I had a part in its birth. But even more, I marvel at the wonderful contribution of all the WordPress community make to this fantastic project.

A client said to me this morning “This WordPress is brilliant isn’t it?” As I helped him set up his fourth WordPress site. You can’t get much clearer praise than that.

So raise a virtual beer (or other non-alcoholic beverage if, like me, you are teetotal) to WordPress, the community, and to another year.

Update: I just spotted this tweet from Andrew Nacin:

http://twitter.com/#!/nacin/status/74139775761793024

Wow! 25 million standalone WordPress sites plus 20 million WordPress.com sites! No wonder it powers more than 14 percent of the web.

WordPress – 8 Years in the making

Wow! Another year has passed and it is now eight years since my fateful comment on Matt’s blog that kicked off this whole WordPress thing!

WordPress is now a mature CMS platform driving 13% of the web! It is used for an astonishing array of very different web sites around the world, from the humblest one person blog to award-winning education sites, celebrity sites, newspapers, and even world leaders!

WordPress is supporting a whole industry of WordPress experts, including me: I’m now in my third year as an independent WordPress specialist.

I believe that WordPress has achieved this massive success in no small way because of the fantastic community around it, the keen-eyed vision of Matt Mullenweg, and the awesome power of the GNU GPL open source license.

With version 3.1 just around the corner, I predict it will be another great year for WordPress.