Happy Birthday WordPress: The CMS Powering the Web is 10 Years Old

Author: Dinesh Dhiman

Wordpress, the CMS that is powering 18 percent of the Internet is 10 years old! Having started its journey as a little known blogging platform, Wordpress has developed into a force to reckon with, as web developers and novices are building sites from simple blogs to complex web portals.

Around 70 million sites on the Internet run on Wordpress and the number is only going to rise in the coming times. It is hard to believe the type of impact Wordpress has on the web. Several big tickets portals including Reuters, The New York Times and CNN have been set up on this CMS.

Brief History

Wordpress began as Cafeblog 10 years back, started by Mike Little and Matt Wullenweg. As of today, the Wordpress community has thousands of contributors, contributing everything from free or paid plugins to themes. The biggest Wordpress contributor is Automattic, the company behind this ground-breaking CMS, and had recently announced that it raised a mind-boggling sum of $50 million via stock transaction.

Some time back, photo blogging platform Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo! for $1 billion. This transaction had raised speculation about Wordpress too going to an Internet big shot, but that did not happen. Wullenweb clarified that his brainchild is not for sale and he is already making big money with it.

Ease of Set Up

Wonder what is the biggest strength of Wordpress? Well, it is the ease with which it can be set up and backing of a huge community. It can be easily set up within five minutes on a web host that supports PHP and MySql. These days, one click Wordpress install is supported by most web hosts. Quite significantly, web hosts would even go to the extent of partnering with Wordpress commercial themes providers to help website owners to set up professional websites while making quick bucks for themselves!

Wordpress is no longer a blogging platform only; it has turned into much more than that. These days, you can build shopping carts, social networking platforms, site management portals, complex websites, and, of course, pretty blogs with its help. All you need to do is to install Wordpress with its famous five minutes install, purchase a theme or code it yourself, and get started. The options for webmaster, designers and developers are simply endless when it comes to Wordpress development.

One can find any number of Wordpress themes, plugins, customs solutions providers and specialized hosting providers. The Wordpress bandwagon keeps rolling on. Folks out there on Wordpress have expressed their desire to make it the ‘operating system’ of the web. Well, given the speed at which it is growing, that might not be impossible!

The Celebrations

The 10th birthday of Wordpress is being celebrated across the globe. Meet-ups are being organized everywhere and a portal http://www.meetup.com/WordPress/ has been set up for that. It doesn’t stop at that as a microsite http://wp10.wordpress.net/ has gone live where everyone having anything to do with Wordpress is sharing his or her experience with it.

Seems tempting enough, isn’t it! If you are looking to set up a Wordpress site for your own, it would be good idea to get in touch with an expert.