# The Development of Wordpress – From The Start

Wordpress is a personal publishing blog-like software. It focuses on web standards and usability. Wordpress is written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. It was developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of the lead developer Matt Mullenweg. This script is distributed under the GNU License.

Some of the features of Wordpress are a templating system, integrated link management, search engine friendly permalink structure, pluggin support, multiple and nested categories for articles, trackback and pingback, typographic filters for proper formatting and text styling, static pages, multiple authors, can store a list of users who visit your site, can block site visitors by IP address, tag support. B2/Cafelog was the precursor to Wordpress. B2 was estimated to be on only 2000 blogs in May 2003! Wordpress first opened in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2. Wordpress began to get more popular in 2004.

Wordpress releases are named after well-known jazz musicians. Wordpress 1.2 was code named Mingus after Charles Mingus. Wordpress 1.5 was released in mid February and code named Strayhorn. This version added a range of new features. One of these features was managing static pages which allows content pages to be created and managed outside a normal blog. This was the first step away from simple blog management software to becoming a full content management system.

You could now also easily activate and deactivate templates, at the click of a button. Their sites were also equipped with a default template (code named Kubrick). This was designed by Michael Heilemann.

As time went on, more Wordpress versions were made all the way up to the recent version. Each version was made better and with more features. Wordpress 2.0 which was released in December of 2005 added editing, better administration tools, image uploading, faster posting, and overhauled the back end of Wordpress. This version also offered improvements to plugin developers.

On January 22, 2007 Wordpress 2.1 was released. This version corrected security issues, redesigned the interface and enhanced editing tools including spell check and auto save. It also improved content management options and a variety of code and database optimizations.

Other Wordpress versions are 2.2, 2.3, 2.5 and 2.51. These versions improved features such as widget support, Atom feed support, speed optimizations, taxonomy system, tags, native tagging support, easy notification of updates, security fixes and more.

Wordpress has now grown to be a huge script. These people are constantly working to make Wordpress the best blog software. Even if you don’t have a blog website you can still use Wordpress. It has some amazing features and it’s easy to use. Thanks to all the people that made this software. Those people are Ryan Boren, Matt Mullenweg, Mike Little, Doug Campbell, Mark Jaquith, Donncha O’Caoimh, Andy Skelton, Michel Valdrighi, Peter Westwood. The even better thing about Wordpress is that it is free to use. Take advantage of this. Experiment with Wordpress and you may find that you will love it too.

Article created by Jake Ruston.

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