May 27, 2003

WordPress released

Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little released WordPressA PHP CMS powering millions of sites — themes, plugins, and the block editor for publishing. 0.7 on May 27, 2003 — a fork of b2/cafelog that became the world's most-used CMSContent management system — software for building and publishing websites without hand-writing every page..

What it was for

WordPressWordPressA PHP CMS powering millions of sites — themes, plugins, and the block editor for publishing. powers blogs, marketing sites, WooCommerce stores, and headless CMSContent management system — software for building and publishing websites without hand-writing every page. backends — themes, plugins, and a familiar admin UIUser interface — the parts of software people see and interact with. on any PHP host. It democratized publishing for non-developers while staying hackable for agencies. Today it runs a large share of the public web.

People

  • Matt Mullenwegco founder
  • Mike Littleco founder

Why it's here

WordPressA PHP CMS powering millions of sites — themes, plugins, and the block editor for publishing. became the default way to publish on the web without building a CMSContent management system — software for building and publishing websites without hand-writing every page. from scratch.

Why it mattered

It proved open-source PHP could dominate consumer publishing and plugin ecosystems at global scale.

What it solved

Blogging tools like b2 were stagnating; developers needed a maintained, extensible fork with a modern admin.

Media

  • WordPress
    ImageWordPress

    WordPress Foundation, GPL, via Wikimedia Commons

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