Due to the huge demand for social media integration and the importance blogs play with on-page search engine optimisation we use WordPress as a first choice platform for our website design and website redesign clients. Here is a little history about the platform.

WordPress History

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal website design publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is modern software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. WordPress believe that focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.

2001 – b2 cafelog launched by Michel Valdrighi.

2003 – Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little fork b2 and create WordPress.

2004 – Plugins are introduced with Version 1.2 (Mingus).

2005 – Theme system and static pages are introduced with Version 1.5 (Strayhorn), followed by persistent caching, a new user role system, and a new backend UI in Version 2.0 (Duke).

2007 – A new UI, autosave, spell check and other new features were introduced in Version 2.1 (Ella). Widgets, better Atom feed support, and speed optimizations came out in Version 2.2 (Getz). And tagging, update notifications, pretty URLs and a new taxonomy system were introduced in Version 2.3 (Dexter).

2008 – Version 2.5 (Brecker) was released with a new administration UI design by Happy Cog, and introduced the dashboard widget system and the shortcode API. Version 2.6 (Tyner) built on 2.5 and introduced post revisions and Press This. A usability study was done on 2.5 over the summer, leading to the development of the Crazyhorse prototype, and the eventual release of Version 2.7 (Coltrane), which redesigned the administration UI to improve usability and make the admin tool more customizable. Version 2.7 also introduced automatic upgrading, built-in plugin installation, sticky posts, comment threading/paging/replies and a new API, bulk management, and inline documentation.

2009 – Version 2.8 (Baker) introduced a built-in theme installer and an improved widget UI and API. Version 2.9 (Carmen) introduced image editing, a Trash/Undo feature, bulk plugin updating, and oEmbed support.

2010 – Version 3.0 (Thelonious) introduced custom post types, custom menu management and allowed the management of multiple sites (called MultiSite).

Let us know if you use WordPress for your website design projects and why you like it.

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