It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it’s now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel’s work on b2/cafélog.
There’s been many milestones and highlights along the way, and many more to come. I’ve been thinking a lot about elements that made WordPress successful in its early years that we should keep in mind as we build this year and beyond. Here’s 11 opinions:
- Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.
- Blogging, commenting, and pingbacks need to be fun. Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better. Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog.
- Wikis are amazing, and our documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.
- Forums should be front and center in the community. bbPress and BuddyPress need some love.
- Every plugin and theme should have all the infrastructure that we use to build WordPress itself—version control, bug trackers, forums, documentation, internationalization, chat rooms, P2, and easy pathways for contribution and community. We shouldn’t be uploading ZIPs in 2024!
- Theme previews should be great, and a wide collection of non-commercial themes with diverse aesthetics and functionality are crucial.
- We can’t over-index for guidelines and requirements. Better to have good marketplace dynamics and engineer automated feedback loops and transparency to users. Boundaries in functionality and design should be pushed. (But spam and spammy behavior deserves zero tolerance.)
- Feedback loops are so important, and should scale with usage and the entire community rather than being reliant on gatekeepers.
- Core should be opinionated and quirky: Easter eggs, language with personality even if it’s difficult to translate, jazzy.
- Everyone developing and making decisions for software needs to use it.
- It’s important that we all do support, go to meetups and events, anything we can to stay close to regular end-users of what we make.
A bonus: Playground is going to change everything. What would you add?
Fun fact: On May 27, 2003 I blogged “Working backwards, earlier tonight was great. Put WordPress out, which felt great.” as one sentence in a 953-word entry written from the porch of my parent’s house where I was accidentally locked out all night until my Dad left in the morning to go to work. Had no idea WordPress would be as big as it is. Earlier that night had set up WP for my friend Ramie Speight, and done some phone tech support for another friend Mike Tremoulet I had met through the local blogger meetup. My friends from high school all had their own domains with WP and that feedback loop was magical for shaping the software.
I Love You, Matt, WordPress gave me a voice in an otherwise impossible digital world
Congrats on 21 years!
Thank you for making WordPress! We love to see more flexibility and easy to use software in coming days.
#5 “Every plugin and theme should have all the infrastructure that we use to build WordPress itself…”
Yes!
Awesome … thanks for bringing one of the highest vibes to the world. You’ve done more for publishing & self-publishing than anyone this century.
Congrats Matt!
For twenty more years! ❤️ thanks for all your efforts
Happy Birthday!
Keep crushing it Matt
Enhorabuena!
I love these backstories about how major internet infrastructure came to be. Happy anniversary!
Guttenberg should be a plugin. Bad move.
Congratulations on 21 years of WordPress! WP changed my life, could not ask for more! Thank you matt!
I love reading these as I reflect on a lot of them myself. Especially this one.
“Blogging, commenting, and pingbacks need to be fun. Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better. Almost every site would be improved by having a great blog.”
21 years! Thanks Matt and Mike and the amazing community.
Congratulations!
Congratulations on 21 years!
I still remember, my first WP site was a gardening site (just a demo) for a small business as part of a project in college. I never thought WordPress would become such an important part of my life, working with the CMS every day since then. Unbelievable.
Honestly impressive, imagine if back then we knew that WP would still be going after 20 years and more!
“a wide collection of non-commercial themes with diverse aesthetics and functionality are crucial.”
I could not agree more !
Technical designer here, interested to work on this.
PS: This post is #1 on Hacker News.
Congrats!
I feel very aligned with these thoughts. Thanks for sharing!
The ones that resonated the most with me are:
– Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.
– Wikis are amazing, and our documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.
– Forums should be front and center in the community. bbPress and BuddyPress need some love.
Congrats from Denmark: I’ve been running my blogs on WordPress since 2005 – and I’m still impressed of how smooth and flexible the CMS is.
Congratulations Word Press @21, thank you
Congratulations on 21 years of WordPress. Thank you both of you Matt & Mike.
I’m reading Zero to One by Peter Thiel now and he is talking about crazy 1999 .com launch parties. Love that WordPress launched outside your parent’s house! Makes me question the value of a flashy launch party.
Congrats
Congratulations Word Press , Thanks
As an parent, congratulations to Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little! You must be filled with pride at this wonderful milestone.
Loved That!
“Every plugin and theme should have all the infrastructure that we use to build WordPress itself—version control, bug trackers, forums, documentation, internationalization, chat rooms, P2, and easy pathways for contribution and community. We shouldn’t be uploading ZIPs in 2024!”
Congratulations, Matt! Thanks
Thank you, Matt and Mike, for building a tool that has changed the world.
Happy 21st Anniversary, WordPress!
Thanks for sharing! I have enjoyed using WordPress for twenty years now.
Congrats on 21 years, I’ve been blogging on WordPress for damn near 20 years in July 2024.
Happy Birthday WordPress
12. Multilingual sites should be easy to create and maintain. Built in.
I’m very curious how the demand for multi-lingual sites will evolve in the next few years when real-time translation becomes really ubiquitous and high-quality on the client side.
Congratulations on 21 years of WordPress. Thanks..
Congrats Matt!
Keep rocking
Matt,
Seeing “21 thoughts on WP 21”, I couldn’t resist adding the 22nd. Just as in 22, one looks ahead to the next chapters of life – becoming an adult, building a career, and perhaps marriage and family, WP should now look beyond its blogging roots and evolve into a mature framework for enterprise – internal tools, no-code solutions, SaaS and like. With its robust features, WP has the potential to revolutionize the enterprise app ecosystem, just as it transformed websites.
Wow, 21 years old! That’s a huge milestone <3
It is also important, in addition to greater attention to bbPress, the continuation of the project with P2 and the resumption of the WordPress Tavern website.
Thank you for the list! I’d love to see improvements for bbPress, themes and blocks in 2024. It would be a big step forward for communities.