Happy Birthday, WordPress

I learned from the news feeds on the Dash­board for this soft­ware, that today is WordPress’s ‘offi­cial’ fifth Birth­day (it was actu­ally 5 years ago back in the begin­ning of the year). While that’s pretty young, in soft­ware years it’s prob­a­bly all the way into some­where in the early teens. The five year mark places the software’s birth in 2003 at some of the dark­est times of the post-Internet bub­ble burst­ing. That such impres­sive and pow­er­ful soft­ware could come out of those times is com­fort­ing, in a way. No mat­ter how poor the eco­nomic cli­mate, new soft­ware can sur­vive, and actu­ally begin to grow in com­plex­ity (and user base).

At the most recent North­ern Voice, the Annual blog­ging con­fer­ence held here in Van­cou­ver, the keynote speaker was Matt Mul­len­weg, the founder of Word­Press. I located his keynote (Thanks to At Large Media, who recorded it and posted it), and thought that on this occa­sion, it might be nice to include it here, so here it is:

Photo of Matt Mullenweg, taken by Kris Krugg

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

So, I imag­ine that at the moment, the cham­pagne corks are pop­ping in New York City (there is a party planned for 9PM in San Fran­cisco, so we can raise a glass here to them then, as well). Happy Birth­day, Word­Press, and con­grat­u­la­tions to Matt Mul­len­weg all of the other folks who worked on it.

Share