WordPress is 10 years old today: Here’s how it’s changed the Web
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
I remember when WordPress first appeared. I'd deployed the b2 blogging engine a couple of times before, and anything which made b2 easier to install/use/adapt was welcome. Amongst the (many) blog systems I'd tried up to then, b2 had the lowest technical barriers but was still an exercise in frustration to get installed and configured. In those early days of blog systems each product had its own quirks, and their own belief about what a blog was and how it should work. WordPress always tried to come across as "the Writer's" blogging system; once you had it setup to your preferences, it would stay out of the way. For the most part, anyway.
WordPress was never perfect, and it's still far from it, but you have to admire any system (particularly on the web) which is still going strong after 10 years, while remaining fairly close to it's original vision and principles. It made writing on the web more accessible to a generation of users, and for all its faults that should be celebrated.
Yes. The temptation to expand it into a full-blown CMS must have been very great. Thankfully, they've managed to keep image galleries, for example, out of the core, while keeping the core flexible enough to allow plugins that implement such things. I still shudder at the general quality of WordPress themes and plugins (basically no security whatsoever), but the core is compact and relatively easy to keep secure thanks to the exclusive focus on blogging.
Well... half of the linked sites ARE blogs. The others have blogs as a part of the website. But isn't it a bit much to suggest that WP is the platform on which those businesses are built?
Moveabletype was the popular blogging software back in the day. It was also easy to install. About the same as wordpress. Copy the files, create a db, add the db/pass. Done.
Moveabletype appeared to be open source. It was perl so you could read the source. It was free. It was hosted on moveabletype.org, the ".org" making it appear to not be commercial. But, then once they got super popular they announced to everyone they were not open source. They wanted something like $30 for a license.
There was a huge backlash and it was during that time that wordpress was created and tons of people switched.
At least that's my understanding of the history. The point being it wasn't wordpress that made blogging easy or popular. There were several products before them including moveabletype and blogger. Had moveabletype not made their fateful decisions wordpress might never have gotten popular.
You remember a vastly different Moveabletype than I do. It was horrible to install and only became better years after Wordpress was picking up huge market share.
I do agree about your comment on licensing. The MT licensing fiasco was the nail in the coffin.
That, and the fact that where Perl once dominated the web - PHP was picking up huge traction and won over the script kiddies due to it's kitchen-sink approach to including everything you need for web development into the language.