The CMS has grown to be able to power the largest enterprise digital experiences, and it only started as a blogging platform. Today WordPress powers over 30% of the web and has over 55,000 plugins.
From personal blogs to strong eCommerce solutions, WordPress can help anyone make their dream a reality. If u ask yourself what is the reason for its growth and success? The answer is simple, it’s because of the strong WordPress community and users like you that the CMS has been able to grow so much, so quickly.
And when you think it was first launched in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little when they released a blog post with a download link and a changelog as a fork of b2/cafelog, and today it powers websites like Wired, Beyonce, Disney, Sony and beyond, you realize WordPress has evolved into so much more than a simple blogging software. Today it is a platform from which any person or company can launch their digital experiences.
Celebrating this 16th birthday, there are few other milestones we should mention that brought WordPress to its well-deserved place. For instance, plugins are one of the main reasons WordPress has grown so much, there are over 50,000 free plugins to help you add any functionality to your site. If you can imagine it, then there’s probably a plugin for it. 2015 is marked because plugin Directory passed one billion downloads.
Also, one of its main features proves to be a strength, the fact that it is entirely open source and always will be thanks to the GNU license which allows anyone to modify, share and use WordPress for free forever.
As mentioned, one of its biggest strengths and probably the defining one is the strong WordPress community. People volunteer to work on core, security, translation and more. Without the community members fixing bugs and reporting vulnerabilities, the CMS wouldn’t be where it is today.
When addressing the community, we have to mention the WordCamps. The first one ever kicked off in 2006 in San Francisco with more than 500 RSCP’s to the event!
In 2018 there were 143 WordCamps worldwide, one of them being WordCamp Skopje, our first Macedonian Camp organized by our local community. Read more about it on our blog.
As you may assume, the community is ever growing, for example just last weekend, from 17th to 18th there were 6 WordCamps worldwide, two took place in the Balkan’s, WordCamp Nis and WordCamp Athens.
Our development team attended WordCamp Nis
and WordCamp Bristol.
WordCamps as many as they are since 2010 are pretty organized events. That is to say, in May 2010, the Foundation created the position of central WordCamp liaison. With that came the first set of WordCamp guidelines, and the events gained structure. Of course, the guidelines evolved throughout the years with community feedback and became what they are today, pretty necessary and pretty useful. With events as big as WordCamp Europe 2016, which took place in Paris, France and had 3,000 attendees, making it the biggest WordPress meetup ever, the guidelines were exactly what the community needed.
The year 2017 is marked with the release of the Gutenberg editor, which erupted the community, giving WordPress a new dimension.
We look forward to many more birthdays, meetups and WordCamps and everything WordPress!