A Decade of WordPress

It was sometime in 2007, during the summer before I started college, that. I first tried out WordPress. I didn't have any hosting of my own, and was rather certain nothing I could write was worth publishing, but I found it facinating to try out locally. I'd already done some basic web design, and played around with the wonders of CSS Zen Garden, but still knew I was far from being able to develop my own professional sites. And here was this free software, WordPress, that let me add some quick tweaks to a theme and turn some basic HTML pages into a modern, powerful site. I was hooked.

So, a couple years later when my Business English professor made making a blog one of our class assignments, I turned to WordPress.com. It lacked some of the power I'd already grown to love, but it was free and worked great. Suddenly, writing online was fun, addictive even, and I was hooked all over again. That basic blog led to to my first paid writing job at Labnol.org, which led to writing at HowtoGeek.com, which led working for AppStorm. All of which were, obviously, powered by WordPress. My entire career, in fact, has been based around writing on WordPress-powered sites.

WordPress was, and still is, Matt Mullenweg's baby, but it's grown far beyond what, surely, anyone could have dreamed of in its early days. It's made web development simpler, and given writers and more a voice on the Internet. It's used for everything from blogs to eCommerce sites, support systems to internal social networking. It powers over 66 million sites, covering everything from CNN and the NY Times to mommy blogs and everything in between.

It's grown up, and gotten more complex, making it better for use as a large CMS for teams and relively less nice for indivual writers. But it still works great, regardless, and even though I personally love lite CMSes like Kirby these days, WordPress is still the best choice for most people. It's the first thing I'd recommend to anyone wanting to start a new site, since it really just works, and empowers you to do more without any coding. And it's rather amazing how, of all CMSes out there, WordPress made blogging practical for the rest of us, and if anything it inspired the rest of the blog engines we love these days.

So, congrats to WordPress on a decade on the 'net, and here's to the next decade. Or century. It sure deserves it.

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