Menu Close

100% Webhost Knowledge Base

C E M S V W
We Wo Wp

WordPress

WordPress is an open-source website content management system (CMS) founded May 27, 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress was forked from b2 CafeLog, written by Michel Valdrighi in 2001. WordPress is written in PHP and uses (typically) a MySQL or MariaDB database.

Like b2 CafeLog, WordPress initially began as blogging software, but as new features like “Pages” (as opposed to chronological “Posts”) and a template (theme) system were added (2005), it made headway beyond blogging to become used as a website CMS. By 2009, it began winning CMS awards, and gained additional momentum in this space with the introduction of custom post types and custom taxonomies in 2010.

From there, WordPress has grown to a platform supporting not only eCommerce, but CMS, LMS, membership sites, and many other web applications.

As of 2021, the growth of WordPress reached a significant milestone when it passed the 40% usage mark, meaning it was running on over 40% of websites. Around the same time, it also passed the percentage of sites listed as “none”, or “other.”

In 2021, approximately 19% of WordPress sites are also running Woocommerce for online sales.

100% WordPress

Did you catch it? There are a few references around this site referring to how long we’ve been working with WordPress, and if you do the math you’ll realize we’re claiming to have worked with it since before its first official release in 2003. No, it’s not a mistake.

We began using WordPress’ predecessor, b2 CafeLog in 2001, and switched to WordPress after its first official release in 2004. We chose b2/CafeLog at the time because it was in our opinion the best-of-breed among blogging platforms, and was licensed under the GNU GPL, which was (and is) important to us. These are the very same reasons it was being used by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, co-founders of WordPress.

There are many WordPress experts around, but very few who can say they’ve been working with it since before it actually became WordPress. We like to think we picked a winner.

Further Reading

WordPress Logo
b2 Cafelog Default Header
b2 Cafelog Default Header
WordPress 1.2 Admin Interface
WordPress 1.2 Admin Interface (May 2004)

Related Entries