WordPress 12th Anniversary

Twelve years ago Matt announced the first official release of WordPress.

Fast forward 12 years and WordPress has:

• More than 80 WordCamps WorldWide
• 6 Major version releases
• 800+ Core Contributors since the first release
• 23% Market Share of the Internet
• 100+ meetup groups in 21+ countries

There is also a tremendous amount of people, organisations, and companies that rely on the existence of WordPress everyday – whether its for a personal website, an agency, freelance developers, or business websites.

The success of WordPress as a tool has a lot to do with the philosophy behind its existence that drives the immensely cohesive community that supports it:

The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing, which means access for everyone regardless of language, geography, gender, wealth, ability, religion, creed, or anything else people might be born with. To do that we need our community to be inclusive and welcoming. There is a sublime beauty in our differences, and they’re as important as the principles that bring us together, like the GPL.

– Matt Mullenweg, State of the Word 2014

As well as the four freedoms that it is built upon:

0. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose
1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
2. The freedom to redistribute.
3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

WordPress also shows no signs of slowing down, especially with Automattic’s recent acquisition of WooCommerce.

Checkout the slides from Matt’s State of the Word 2014:

You can watch the address here on WordPress.tv.

Thank you too Matt for getting WordPress to us, and to the entire WordPress community who work to making the web a better place.

FiveForTheFuture is really something everyone who relies on WordPress should think about.