As we get ready for WordPress’s 15th birthday this month, we’re gonna take a look at the history – what’s happened in the last 15 years in the life of WordPress – right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 388.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we’re gonna dive into the history behind WordPress and things that have happened along the way – along these last 15 years. But before we do that, I have some announcements that I want to share with you and a plugin, of course, like always. The first announcement is about the Gutenberg webinar that I’m going to be doing this Friday. It’s really exciting even though I haven’t done a webinar in years, actually.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve done a webinar and that was mainly because of the kids and making a bunch of noise at home and I was never sure when was a good time. But I’m going to be doing a webinar on Friday the 11th and it is going to be at 1:00 p.m. Eastern and I believe that is 1700 UTC, if you can do the calculations for wherever you live in the world. And I just want to go over and it’s gonna be about a half hour or so. I’m just gonna talk through Gutenberg and how it’s gonna affect new sites and what that interface looks like and just to be prepared for it. That’s coming in WordPress 5.0 and that’s coming out in a month or two months.

It’s kind of waiting on this Gutenberg new editor experience to be finished before WordPress actually gets launched, but I wanted to go ahead and just show you behind the scenes and what that looks like. There is a link in the show notes where you can sign up or you can register and I want to just let you know about that. And so that is the Gutenberg webinar happening this week. If you happen to be listening to this a few weeks later, it’s going to be recorded and it will be uploaded to YourWebsiteEngineer.com underneath the webinar section of the website and so you’ll be able to watch that replay whenever you get a chance. So, that is the first announcement of the week.

The second announcement this week is about WordPress beta one of 4.9.6 and this is the latest version. It is something they’re working on because 5.0 is not quite ready yet and it is the first round of testing. It brings in some GDPR tools inside of WordPress. We talked about GDPR last week. That’s the General Data Protection Regulation and it fixes ten bugs and it heavily focuses on privacy enhancements. It has a privacy tab right there when you login and it helps you to create a privacy settings page and a privacy policy page and it gives the ability to export and remove personal data from your WordPress site. And so that’s all built into WordPress 4.9.6.

Again, starting the beta process now and I’m sure it’ll be out in a couple weeks – right before that GDPR goes into effect in the end of May. So, that’s the first announcement. The other announcement that I have today – or the second announcement I guess – is about Jetpack and Jetpack 6.1. It is a maintenance release and this also has some information and some compliance of GDPR built into it. It allows you to do not track changes on stats. It’s got some improvements to word ads and a few other enhancements. So, if you’re using Jetpack, I recommend updating to the latest version and that is version 6.1 and if you want to read more about it, there’s a link in the show notes for episode number 388.

Then the other thing that’s happening is WordCamp Dayton. WordCamp Dayton’s happening next week, which is crazy it’s coming up so fast. If you are in the Dayton area and would like to know more about it, you can head on over to 2018.Dayton.WordCamp.org and you’re welcome to come and hang out here in the wonderful city of Dayton. It’s getting really nice in this area and it should be a lot of fun. But if you’re not in Dayton – and even if you’re busy this weekend or the next weekend – there is something called WordSess and it’s WordSess 5 and it’ll be returning on July 25th of 2018.

It’s being organized by Brian Richards. He’s the founder of WP Sessions and there’s a collection of partners involved. There is a schedule that’s put online and it is basically a big, long day. It’s like a WordCamp that you can do right online. It starts at –let’s see, it looks like – 8:00 in the morning. It’s probably Eastern time because Brian’s located in Eastern time and then it goes until 8:00 p.m. at night. So, it’s 12 hours’ worth of content. There is a break for lunch at 11:00 and there’s different chats that you can actually hangout online with people in the area and then there’s a couple other breaks built in throughout the day. But there are opening remarks and then there’s a session by Mike Little.

We’ve got some of the core contributors of WordPress. We’ve got Brad Williams. We’ve got Carrie Dils. We’ve got Aaron Campbell. We’ve got Chris Lema. So, there’s lots of great content that’s there. The tickets, I think, are $25.00 for the livestreaming and I’m sure that everything will be recorded and you’ll be able to have access to that later as well. So, that is WordSess. So, that is all of the announcements for this week – a lot of things happening in the WordPress space. I feel like this happens every year come the early spring or late spring/early summer. We’re getting geared up and there’s fun and exciting things doing outside and WordCamp season is upon us and there’s gonna be a lot of announcements and a lot of things happening over the next few weeks and months. So, that is the news for this week.

The other thing that I want to share with you today is a plugin called Bulk Menu Creator and this is a plugin that maybe perfect for you if you are trying to create multiple items at once. If you’ve ever tried to create a menu before in the customizer or even in just the appearance section of your WordPress dashboard, you have to manually add them one at a time and – especially if you’re adding menu items that are linking to different places or you have URLs that you’re already ready to use – then this Bulk Menu Creator may be the perfect plugin for you. You can create them from multi-line text and you can just automatically add a whole bunch of them all at one time. It’s a brand new plugin. It doesn’t have a lot of active installs, but if this is something that you are interested in or will find a need for, I definitely recommend checking it out.

What’s so cool about WordPress with all of the plugins that are out there – the thousands upon thousands of plugins that are on the WordPress repository – we’re at 55,269 as I’m recording this. But this little plugin is just one little thing – a little enhancement – that somebody needed and it’s out there on the repository and anybody can use it. I love that and I love that it’s open source and we have that ability to create things that are beneficial to us and then share it with the greater WordPress community. So, that is all about the plugin of the week.

Alright. Today, we’re gonna take a look back. We’re gonna look at the greatest hits, if you will – kind of the big, overarching things – that have happened in WordPress over the last 15 years and I am, honestly, excited to kind of learn some of this stuff myself. This was an article over on the WPMUdev.org website earlier in the month and I just thought, “Hey, this is a great opportunity to share some information that’s happening across the WordPress space” and some of this stuff you know you may have no idea about because you might have just started using WordPress last year or even last month or barely have even started using it now.

So, I just wanted to go do a little bit of a recap and – as we’re getting ready for the WordPress birthday, anniversary celebration – whatever we’re calling it. Is it an anniversary? Is it a birthday? Who knows, but that’s what I’m just gonna go through and talk about. It goes all the way back to 2001, which is before the 15th year, but that’s when the concept was formed and 2001 is when the B2/Cafelog – that was a blogging software inspired by Blogger – but it was built in PHP and had a MySQL database. It was a brand new approach to developing content on the web. So, it caught the attention of folks who were interested. This was by a French developer named Michele Valdrighi. I don't know. I can’t pronounce his name, but that is where it all got started. That was in 2001.

And then one of these people that was really interested in the software – who was a student at the time at the University of Houston – was Matt Mullenweg and he was a user of the B2/Cafelog platform and then in 2002, this Michele kind of disappeared. There was nobody there. There was nobody to verify if themes were working or whatever that looks like and nobody knew if the software was outdated, could they trust it, is it something that they should be concerned about? Mullenweg experienced this. He didn’t know what was happening and it wasn’t ideal, but Matt took the initiative to do something about it. He saw value in it and decided to build something more powerful from it.

It’s explained in the codex as, “WordPress is born out of the desire for an elegant, well-architectured, personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL.” So, that was all in 2002. In 2003, May 27th to be precise, and 2003 that’s when WordPress officially launched. That’s when the developer of B2 and Cafelog kind of disappeared. There was nothing more from him on the internet as of December 2002. Matt Mullenweg wrote a post on his blog stating interest in forking it. Then the software was gonna be general public license. That’s what the B2 software was. So, he had every right to take it – even without permission from the original owner – and then British developer, Mike Little, caught wind of what Matt was doing, reached out to him, offered him assistance and created the fork.

And then there was a lady – her name is Christine. I met her at one of the events. I think it was at Wu Conf a couple years ago and she talked about how she was the one responsible that came up with the WordPress name and had a big old story behind it and how her and Matt kind of came up with this WordPress name. And then five months later, on May 27th – this was five months from when this all started – on May 27th is when the project was forked and complete and officially launched. Then, once the software was forked, there was a lot of kind of reworking of everything and how it all works and the files now have WP- and that’s basically because the shift was made from B2-. Those were the files from the B2 system and they changed them to WP.

And so that’s one of the reasons that we have WP- content. WP- login, and all of those different files inside our WordPress installed. By the end of the year then, in 2003, Matt made one final, big push to finish out the year strong and he created a thorough set of documentation and that is known as the WordPress codex. And so it was mainly because people were clamoring for more information. They wanted to know how this thing worked and how they could fix it and whatnot. And so a team of WordPress developers and him worked together and they created the codex. In 2004, plugins arrive. One of the noteworthy changes that came to WordPress in the 1.2 release – which was code-named Mingus – was they got plugins for the first time. The announcement said, “New plugin architecture.

A plugin architecture simplifies modifying or extended WordPress’s features. Plugins can now hook into nearly every action that WordPress does.” So, that was the big thing in 2004. In 2005, there’s continuing things that happen in the WordPress space. There was the ability to create pages inside of WordPress. There was a new, faster UI for WordPress that included Javascript and DHTML. There was built in object caching. There was an introduction to the “what you see is what you get” editing feature. You now had user roles. Those were all revamped. Akismet was created. So, that was part of the whole process – Akismet to kind of keep those spam comments away – and there was the very first backup plugin was created. That one no longer exists though, but that was the first one in 2005. There was also a new theme system.

It’s funny to kind of see the themes being tucked away in a simplistic manner if you look back at the change logs and whatnot because it’s so natural to have themes and sections on your website for themes. And then in 2005 as well, Matt founded Automatic. The first year, the company raised over a million dollars in Series A funding. So, that was in 2005. In 2006, the WordPress brand continued to grow. It registered the trademark and the logo. That all happened in 2006 and it kind of solidified hold over the brand. The WordPress community began to spring up. The first WordCamp was hosted in San Francisco that year of 2006 and it was a one-day WordCamp and it was over 500 people attended the event. That’s all back in 2006.

In 2007, there were more updates, more acquisitions, and the first major security attack. Widgets, autosave, spellcheck, WordPress continued to churn out new versions and new features to make it easier for bloggers to voice their opinions online. In the meantime, Automatic purchased Gravatar. That’s the thing that integrates seamlessly with WordPress and allows you to have a personal image connected to your email address. Then in 2007, they also had the first major brush with security breach. It happened at the start of the year on a number of SEO blogs. It was discovered that the vulnerability was located in one of WordPress’s web servers.

So, when the 2.1.1 version was released, the websites that were exposed, there was a problem with backdoor injections. So, the team quickly fixed it and – as soon as it was detected – and they had a big target on their backs even from the early days back in 2007. 2008, this was a good year for streamlined workflows. There was a WordPress automatic upgrader right from the WordPress admin. This means that WordPress users no longer had to manually install plugins or download new versions. It could all be done with a single click. Other updates were made to the WordPress dashboard to include not only the lack of interface, but also usability.

The most important one was the shift in the menu from the top across the dashboard to the sidebar where it sits now in 2018. And then I guess two other worthy things that happened in 2008 to talk about is that Automatic raised another 30 million in Series B funding and the second was that WordPress received an award from InfoWorld for the best open source software for collaboration. So, that was in 2008. Moving onto 2009, there was more of a focus on themes and plugins, the release. The first major one in 2009 was called Baker and it introduced a built in WordPress theme installer. So, once the WordPress team saw how well received the plugin installer was in 2008, it made sense to bring it into the workflows for people using themes and wanting to bring their own themes into WordPress.

The widget interface was redesigned and that’s kind of what happened in Baker. Carmen brought exciting new developments with batch updating. You could image edit within WordPress. There was video embeds and there was post thumbnails were integrated with WordPress themes. And then there was another award – one in 2009 – and that was for the overall best open source CMS. 2009, by the way, is the year that I got involved with WordPress and it was the year that I really didn’t like WordPress. I mean before that, I didn’t really know what it was and so I couldn’t dislike it.

But then in 2009, I was just really frustrated with how hard it was to get up and running and I couldn’t do exactly what I wanted because I was used to using a tool like Dreamweaver and building menus and things like that and so 2009 was the year that I finally got started with WordPress. 2010 was when WordPress 3.0 came out. That was a huge release. It was not necessarily a big release based on functionalities, but it brought in the WordPress community. It was when we got multi-site and so it was the first year for multi-site and I believe in that year too – somewhere in the 2010 region – was when the menus got built in so you could click and drag and build menus right in from the WordPress dashboard. So, that was 2010.

2011 WordPress gets even faster, lighter, and more user friendly and there was three major releases that year. They introduced the admin bar, a writing interface, and enhanced linking. And then there was distraction-free writing mode, improved comment moderation, and more efficient handling of WordPress updates. And then Sunny, which was the last one in 2011, brought with the drag and drop media uploader, tool tip, intros to new features, and hover menus in the WordPress navigation. 2012 … Man, there’s a lot of things that have happened. 2012 had the Green update and that was to give the customizer in real time preview. So, the customizer has been around since 2012. That’s been almost six years that that’s been around.

It gave the users that ability to customize things and see it immediately without having to save or refresh their site. Alvin was another release in 2012 and that focused on fixing problems users experience when working with media in WordPress. There was three releases in 2013 and that focused a lot on security – security was added – updates for media integration and making it easier to navigate and add media to posts and pages. And then the last update was Parker of that year and that gave us the new interface. It used to be called MP6 – kind of like we’re doing Gutenberg now and Gutenberg is this new editor that will roll into core. Then this was it was called MP6 and you could install this and you could start seeing the new interface built right in and that’s how they worked it. So, that’s the interface that we see today when we’re looking at the dashboard.

And then the last thing in 2013, Automatic received a little bit over $126 million in two new rounds of funding. That’s when I joined Automatic was the end of 2013 and so that was the big year there that I kind of jumped from the freelance career to being a happiness engineer or support tech over at Automatic. So, that was 2013. In 2014, things continue to happen. There were more updates. They updated the visual editor, the drag and drop images inside the editor, gallery previews. There was visible embeds with the visual editor. There’s an expanded editor. It was easier to search and more metrics available in the plugin director.

Then Automatic got its last round of funding in 2014. This time it was for $160 million, bringing the total raised to over 317 million for Automatic and this enabled Automatic to invest and acquire a number of other web properties over the years to continue to build out services and whatnot. And then in 2015 through 2017, these are all kind of grouped together – but it basically is just keeping WordPress a well-oiled machine. It’s adding little features here and there. So, starting in 2015, we got improved character support and the ability to switch themes in the customizer – even if they weren’t installed – and you could embed more kinds of content. We had menu customizations inside the customizer tool. We got fab icons, stronger password generation techniques.

The release Clifford tackled many responsive images issues and integrated some of the rest API things in. Coleman added live responsive previews to the theme customizer, enabled themes to include custom logos and smart imagery sizing. Pepper gave us some improvements to the editor, but it looks like the bulk of the work was done making things faster and easier for developers. Then there was a release called Vaughn and Vaughn gave video background functionality as well to improved visibility and functionality within the customizer tool. Evans was all about widgets; image widgets, audio widgets, and rich text widgets. Those were all kind of fixed and worked through.

Tipton came next and it was giving web developers even a more streamlined WordPress workflow. You could schedule draft and work on posts now and there was new ways for collaboration within WordPress while safeguarding any changes and makes about your work. Then as we get to 2018, there’s a lot more going on. The big thing that we’ll see this year is the Gutenberg editor. Again, if you’re interested, there will be a webinar this Friday about Gutenberg and how it’s gonna change and how your workflows may or may not be a little bit different when that comes out, but that’s something to think about and that’s something that I’m really excited about sharing this week.

And so a lot coming on in the WordPress scene and I think we’ll see a lot of plugins adapt this Gutenberg lifestyle and kind of the way that it works and the way that it’s easier to make changes and customize things within WordPress. So, that was a mouthful. That was a little bit longer of an episode than normal, but those are all of the things. Those are all the things that have happened in the last 15 years. I can’t imagine in 15 more years looking back and seeing what WordPress … you know going through kind of this stage again and be like, “Oh, wow. There was a time when there was no plugins and there was a time when you couldn’t even create a page for your WordPress site?”

So, yes, all of those things have happened in the last 15 years. That’s what I wanted to share with you today. I hope you found this enjoyable – this little walk through Memory Lane – and figuring out what happened in WordPress so many years ago – probably more years ago than we’ve all been working with WordPress. Unless you’ve been with WordPress since 1.0, please let me know that, but I think we’ve all kind of stumbled upon WordPress at some way, shape, or form that is a lot more like the current version today than it was the very, very first version. So, that’s what I wanted to share. We’ll talk again next week. Take care and bye-bye.