The Origins Of Wordpress

Once upon a time, there was a simple, PHPbased blogging platform called b2. This software, developed in 2001, slowly gained a bit of popularity among geek types as a way to publish content on the Internet. Its developer, Michel Valdrighi, kept development active until early 2003, when users of the software noticed that Valdrighi seemed to have disappeared. They became a little concerned about b2s future.

Somewhere deep in the heart of Texas, one young man in particular was very concerned, because b2 was his software of choice for publishing his own content on the World Wide Web. He didnt want to see his favorite publishing tool go to waste or to face a tough decision about moving on to something new and unknown. You can view the original post to his own blog in which he wondered what to do (http:// ma.tt/2003/01/the-bloggingsoftware-dilemma).

In that post, he talked briefly about some of the other software that was available at the time, and he tossed around the idea of using the b2 software to to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around.

Create a fork, he did. In the absence of b2s developer, this young man developed from the original b2 code base a brand-new blogging application called WordPress.

That blog post was made on January 24, 2003, and the young mans name was (and is) Matt Mullenweg. On December 26, 2003, with the assistance of a few other developers, Mullenweg announced the arrival of the first official version of the WordPress software. The rest, as they say, is history. The history of this particular piece of software surely is one for the books, as it is the most popular blogging platform available today.