Happy Birthday WordPress!

Double digits! It’s a big celebration–and you’ve earned it.

Today is WordPress’s 10th birthday. Back in 2003, WP version 0.7 appeared and was clunky, simple, and it worked. Today WordPress is sleek, beautiful (in that Code is Poetry kind of way), as powerful as you need it to be, and it works. In fact, if I had to stand up at one of the white-tableclothed round tables at the reception and had to say only one thing about the birthday boy, I might just say, “It just works.” If it doesn’t work, it’s rarely WP’s fault (plugins, themes, hosting, etc.). It might not be a very sexy thing to say at the big birthday party, but the ones who know how important it is … know.

Today we expect our software (and hardware) to just work. But the more complicated it becomes, the less it tends to work–and the more it crashes. WP rarely “crashes.” Hosting crashes, plugins crash all kinds of things, but WP at its core, just doesn’t crash much.

Your push lawnmower doesn’t “crash” much either. But it can’t run your e-commerce site or your membership site, power your photography portfolio, or run an extensive, unlimited site multisite installation.

I’m no hard-core programmer, but I know enough to know that WP isn’t bloatware–it doesn’t try to solve everyone’s problems. It sticks to the Do One Thing and Do It Well philosophy, although it keeps growing and expanding at a reasonable pace. Of course, if you need it to do more, there are thousands of plugins and themes that can probably get you there.

But if you’re here on Likoma, you know I’m already a big WordPress fan and chances are, since you’re reading this, you are too. WordPress has a been a huge part of Likoma’s history and a huge part of my life over the past maybe 8 years, so I’ll stop with how great it all is and just say Happy Birthday, WordPress! Here’s to the past 10 years–and the next!