Who invented wordpress

WordPress project is driven by a community of dedicated developers, users, and supporters Related: Why is WordPress free? On May 27, , Matt announced the availability of the first version of WordPress. It was well received by the community. It was based on b2 Cafelog with significant improvements.

The post editor looked like this:. In May , version 1. This enabled users and developers to extend the functionality of WordPress by writing their own plugins and sharing them with rest of the community. As WordPress was opening itself to the community, something totally opposite was happening in the blogging industry at that time.

The market leader in blogging tools industry at that time was Moveable Type. They announced new licensing terms which were not liked by many of their users. This forced many of their users to look for a new blogging platform. WordPress 1. The adaption rate of WordPress skyrocketed with this release. With the increase in the number of users, WordPress started getting better with the help and interest of the community. In February , WordPress 1. Matt announced themes with these words:.

You can have your entire weblog run through a single file, just like before, or you can literally have a different template for every single different category. In December , WordPress 2. This new admin area was a complete overhaul of the administration screens in WordPress.

Users were now able to add categories and tags to posts without leaving the post editor or delete comments without reloading the comments screen. It was the first release that came with Akismet anti-spam plugin pre-installed. It also came with a WordPress database backup plugin, wp-db-backup, which was then dropped in Another first for this release was the introduction of a functions.

In , a web design company called Happy Cog joined the WordPress project to help design a new WordPress admin interface. A usability study was conducted to design the admin UI. Throughout the year new features such as shortcodes , one-click updates, and built-in plugin installation were added to WordPress with different releases. This was a significant moment in WordPress history, because it ensured that WordPress will continue to grow, and is not dependent on a company or a group of developers to continue the project.

On June 17, , WordPress 3. This release introduced several features such as custom post types , better custom taxonomies , custom backgrounds, header, menus, contextual help on admin screens, etc. In , Post formats and admin bar made their way into WordPress.

Around that time, some really cool WordPress plugins were building powerful eCommerce platforms on top of WordPress. This enabled WordPress users to create online stores and build powerful ecommerce websites using WordPress.

In , theme customizer, theme previews, and new media manager were introduced. These features tremendously helped new users in creating image galleries and previewing themes before they change to a new theme. In , WordPress 3. And you could finally add custom CSS within the customizer.

Thanks to the customize API and the new focus of the WordPress team on the theme customizer, developers are now building various customizer frameworks to elevate and provide a unique editing experience for WordPress users. For developers, you can now register post type templates. This included the visual editor being accessible inside widgets, as well as a new image widget, video widget, and audio widget.

Along with the WordPress 4. Previously when you would select a link and edit it, sometimes you would end up linking the word next to it, or not being able to move the cursor outside the link element. To help better resolve this issue they have added what they call link boundaries, or rather blue borders around them when they are selected. The latest version, WordPress 4. It was simply displayed in plain text. With WordPress 4.

This is great news, especially for developers, as it is now easier to quickly make small code changes, as well as tweak CSS in the customizer. Another changed that was introduced was a new way to save changes in the Customizer. Thanks to changesets, user customizations can be saved as drafts or scheduled to be published in the future. This means that site admins can discard changes and restore the Customizer to the last published state before the final publication. Being an open source platform, WordPress helped tens of thousands of people find work.

In this section, we want to expand past WordPress to look at the companies that make up the ecosystem. Theme marketplaces make up a huge part of the ecosystem. Almost microcosms of the entire WordPress community, these marketplaces are a great place to connect with different WordPress developers, users, and contractors. Changing the design of your WP based site is fairly easy: instead of creating a full web design from scratch, you can turn to a theme shop and for a small investment you can choose from thousands of designs to find the one you have in your mind.

Nowadays you can find more than 4, premium themes on ThemeForest and the number is increasing rapidly. This reflects the huge demand for premium WordPress themes quite well. Standing right next to the popularity of ThemeForest is WooThemes. You might have heard of them if you have an ecommerce site, because their WooCommerce plugin is by far the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress.

Back in there were only a couple people selling WP themes, and I had a few free themes available for download on my website, which got a lot of traction. I also got a lot of requests for the customization of these free themes, and that is when we saw the potential and started WooThemes.

I also believe we offer some of the best support in the WP marketplace, which is why customers keep coming back. Their flagship, Zerif theme, is an awesome single-page design, loved and used by hundreds of thousands not exaggerating of users worldwide. CopyBlogger is one of the most visited blogs on the planet. It is only fitting that his theme company has over , website owners using his premium WordPress theme framework.

The team over at Organic Themes has been creating and designing fresh WordPress themes since They currently have over , users and a large library of 36 responsive themes for artists, businesses, and bloggers.

WPZOOM is a small team dedicated to helping individuals and businesses engage with their audiences across the web. When you think of iThemes , one word might come to your mind: Builder. This framework and the themes built on top of it allow you to create your own layout, so you can customize the entire site the way you want it to look. If you want to create a squeeze page with a completely different layout than the rest of the website, you can create one in a couple of minutes, and still keep the rest of your site as is.

Mojo Themes is another huge marketplace. It has been around since , and is gaining a reputation for quality WordPress themes as well as two other popular CMS systems : Drupal and Joomla. We started the marketplace because we thought we could make an impact on open source software and especially WordPress market and ecosystem.

We are passionate about the individual communities and felt that providing an avenue for designers and developers to make money would be a great place to start. We have worked hard to build up a friendly atmosphere within the company and to be personally available for our sellers and buyers.

I like to think that people come back to MOJO because they trust us and they know that they can get ahold of us if they have a problem. We really try and live by small town rules. It seems that often it can be very easy to hide behind your computer and not respond to a customer when they need you the most. I think WordPress will grow a lot in terms of the technology in the next few years.

It seems to me at least that WordPress has been tailored to personal bloggers but I can see WordPress introducing more enterprise-like features and functionality. We will see a big increase in applications powered by it.

Elegant Themes has one of the best theme promotions in the industry. Therefore, it is no surprise that they have over , clients.

This list grows every year as they come out with new ones about once a month. Just as important as theme developers and shops are the coders who extend the basic functionalities of WordPress with all kinds of extra features that make our lives so much easier.

Keep in mind that thousands of individual developers create plugins as well, and the developers we discuss here are just a small part of a much larger plugin development community.

If you are looking for the best and most popular plugins we recommend you to take a look at this guide: Hand-picked list of the best WordPress plugins.

Does your audience speak more than one language? Then WPML is the right plugin for you. It helps WordPress users with creating and publishing content in multiple languages. You can easily translate your pages, posts and theme texts with it.

Works with all WP versions above 3. Should you have any problems, the support team is there to help you! As with many businesses, one initial idea spurned further ideas and products. Translating website content is very difficult.

You need to spend a great deal of time and effort setting up and maintaining a multilingual website. The complexities of translating all aspects of a website led to the creation of WPML, a plugin that manages content translation of websites from within the site admin page. WordPress is by far the best CMS in terms of user experience and rewarding the efforts made.

You can easily translate your pages, posts and theme texts with the plugin. It also works with all WP versions and supports themes that are out of the box.

Should you have any problems, the support team is there to help you, available 6 days a week. Last year we also released chat support, meaning customers can have real-time conversations to solve any issue they may have. There are support forums in 7 different languages.

We expanded our forums because we care about our clients and want to service them in other languages besides English. Our clients play a major role in starting the WPML road map and we have regular feedback calls with them where we listen to their input. The fact that our employees come from so many different countries and cultures helps us to understand what it takes to develop an excellent multilingual WordPress plugin. Our new Advanced Translation Editor was launched last year and we are developing new features in , so look out for our latest announcements on the WPML blog.

We have also been busy with Toolset, our plugin we first released in to help non-coders build advanced WordPress sites. Back then it was called Types and last May we migrated all the plugins under the brand Toolset. Toolset solves most of the problems that developers face when creating a new site. It lets developers define content types, display rich and complex data, set access levels, and even create or edit content from the front end of the site.

Over the last few years, we have been releasing more features into Toolset, helping and improving the way developers use the platform. We are working on a big project which will help users build attractive custom sites using Toolset without the need for an additional page builder, by extending the powerful editor that comes with WordPress. A couple of years ago before the 3.

This is great for universities looking to give students their own blog, or corporations with many market-friendly bloggers on staff. Besides having a bunch of WordPress related services, Automattic has released quite a few plugins, paid and free, which generate revenue for the billion dollar company.

Akismet is one of the most famous anti-spam plugins, while Jetpack extends your WP install with a lot of extra functionality and services. Gravity Forms is one of the best examples of how a single plugin based company can grow into a huge enterprise with thousands of license owners and a vast amount of paid addons available in their marketplace. IgnitionDeck is a crowdfunding plugin that lets you turn your WordPress into a powerful fundraising platform. Theme designers, custom WordPress design agencies and everyday site owners are all happy owners of Visual Composer.

Easy Social Share is a social media plugin that has everything. Keep in mind that using a ridiculous amount of plugins can cause problems with your site over time. Some plugins conflict with each other and unfortunately many poorly written plugins will break your site immediately after activating them.

Ecommerce is a large part of the WordPress ecosystem because one of the most popular ways to make money from a website is to directly sell products or services to visitors.

In order to do that you need a so-called ecommerce system or shopping cart plugin. In the golden days it was extremely difficult to create and manage such a site, not so today! With the appearance of plugins like WP eCommerce and later WooCommerce you can set one up in a couple of minutes tops.

One of the most popular ones is Easy Digital Downloads which is a free plugin that you can extend with many free and paid add-ons. One of their new products is AffiliateWP which, as the name suggests, is an affiliate marketing plugin for WordPress and based on our experience is the most complete.

With so many entrepreneurs turning to WordPress for a cheaper web alternative, a large number of WordPress consultants have appeared in recent years to help them.

They provide advice and help with everything related to WP from setup to selecting hosting, plugins and themes. Besides that there are a couple of teams focusing on helping you with everyday tasks like backing up your site or fixing and securing it if there was a security breach for example, like a valet service for your website!

Many of these technical tasks prove to be too complex or just too time-consuming for everyday site owners. They are WordPress support and maintenance service companies with plans that work for beginners to enterprise level websites. One of the most famous consultant firms is Yoast. While Yoast could easily be part of the plugin section, we chose to focus on their consulting side. The Yoast team Img src: Yoast. As with all other categories in this article, there are a lot more of consultants out there.

In fact we believe that most web design companies and freelancers who deal with WordPress provide some level of advice for clients.

If you know WordPress in and out maybe the easiest way to start earning money in exchange for your knowledge is to start charging people for professional advice. Probably this is the most populous category. Tens of thousands of web designers and developers specialize in WordPress all around the world. They create beautiful, customized designs and extra functionality for WP based sites utilizing a wide variety of tools and programming languages.

Or a mix of both. Tom McFarlin is one of the better-known developers who regularly blogs about everything related to WordPress: opinions and high quality, detailed tutorials. As a developer, I bet you have worked with many content management systems, why did you choose focusing on WordPress? Each week, there are requests for new and exciting projects that keep the work interesting and fulfilling. WordPress has become so extensive that more and more craftsmen decide to specialize in one particular area or another.

Bill Erickson , for example, is one of the increasing number of people who work mainly with Genesis, a WordPress theme framework. On the agency side, you have great teams such as the guys and gals of 10up who are changing the ways companies and websites are built.

It has often been joked that when Automattic developers leave the company, they go to 10up. Over the past few years, they have brought on many of the best developers in the industry to work for them.

Because the company allows all employees to work remotely, they can find the best talent in the world to work for them. We help make WordPress. They also give back to the community as much as they can, they have released many plugins, gave speeches at WordCamps and other WP meetups, and also organized a few of them. A Minneapolis-based agency, Werkpress has specialized on WordPress too. Just like the previous two companies, the Werkpress guys are also active members of the community you can bump into them at WordCamps and meetups!

And lastly, you have Modern Tribe , a digital agency who pushes the boundaries of WordPress with large-scale implementations for Fortune companies, governments, educational institutions, and well-funded startups. Like many of the other areas of the WordPress ecosystem, the CMS platform changed webhosting forever. Besides the very WordPress focused support, the entire architecture is fine-tuned to this particular CMS.

That includes custom tailored caching systems, managed backup solutions, security, WP-friendly hosting control panels and more! In the past 12 years many more companies appeared offering managed hosting solutions. The most widely known is WP Engine. Flywheel is a company that decided to laser target a niche in the niche: they provide WordPress specialized hosting for web design agencies and freelancers.

Kinsta we are the creators of this guide is the newest company in the managed WordPress hosting world. Over the past few years, power users have developed multiple sites on WordPress. Some of them get to the point, where managing all of these sites is just not efficient enough to make it worthwhile. Fortunately, companies have come to the rescue to help users with managing all of their WordPress sites with ease.

With it you can do one-click updates, uptime monitoring, theme and plugin installs, bulk add new posts and pages, mass remove spam comments, backups and much more! Of course later on ManageWP has grown bigger and we became a product company. ManageWP enhances the WordPress experience. We are giving the user all the tools they need for managing their website, keep them updated and secure, while offering the best-in-class support.

We are constantly improving our service including features, code, infrastructure or technology. There are many cool things we have in plan for our customers in the future. WP Remote can also handle all your update needs, for the core, the plugins and themes. It can create backups too! Free and paid versions are available. InfiniteWP is a free solution to manage all your WordPress sites just like the two products above.

It has, however, paid addons for more complex tasks. As WordPress continues to evolve every day, keeping up with the WordPress updates, new services, themes, plugins, and WordPress based businesses can become a job all by itself. That is why some prominent WordPress news sites appeared over the past few years to help WordPress users stay up to date with the industry.

These sites provide users with information in one central location. Furthermore, businesses also need a place to let users know what they are working on without scattering the information across the internet haphazardly.

These news sites play an important role in keeping the community updated. Most posts are written by Sarah Gooding and Jeff Chandler. Another great site is WP Mayor. In the words of the site, they provide WordPress news, articles, hacks, plugin reviews, and more. The site is running and edited by Jean and Alyona Galea.

The number of WordPress news, plugins, themes and services is growing constantly, how can you keep up with it? How do you select or highlight topics that you think your readers might be interested in? The number of WordPress plugins is growing exponentially. It is impossible to keep track of all plugins, but naturally, the real good ones gradually rise to the top as more and more people download them or praise them publicly.

One of our primary aims at WP Mayor is to help uncover great plugins, themes and services and showcase them to all those working with WordPress. Since we have thousands of regular readers, we have a great pulse on the community and through reader feedback we know what kind of plugins they need.

Thus we try to address these requests by featuring plugins that perform operations that readers have asked us about. We love WordPress because of its flexiblity as a system and the awesome community around it. This is a general-purpose site about WordPress.

They always have coupons for various WP products too! This is my WordPress specialist company providing web development, training, and consultancy services. This has now grown to include several spinoff sites. I have worked on a few UK government WordPress sites. I have worked with many varied clients. A New York Times best-selling author. Several local and national charitable and campaigning organisations.

A world-renowned opera singer. Schools, universities, and many more. Contact me to find out more. I am a published author. I wrote the WordPress section of the book. I am also a technical editor. I have worked on a number of technical books for Wiley and Sons and other publishers. I am passionate about what I do and the projects I work on. I have had a lifelong interest in free and open source software. I have worked with and contributed to several projects. Mike provided training to our staff on the use of Word Press, he was able to support the varying levels of knowledge within the group, and developed their knowledge on its use to a higher level.

We have used Mike a number of times and he is professional, personable and an expert in his field.