14 DAY TRIAL // WordPress is now eight years old. Way back in 2003, WordPress 0.7 was released, the first version of the very popular blogging software. What started out as an open-source web publishing platform became one of the biggest things on the web, powering tens of millions of sites.
While WordPress definitely didn't invent blogging, it made it easy for anyone to create a blog while still retaining full control over all aspects, including the content, hosting and so on.
The freedom that the WordPress software enabled, combined with the increasingly powerful features made it the most popular blogging platform to date.
It also spawned Automattic, the company created by Matt Mullenweg, that now drives development of the WordPress software and also operates WordPress.com which offers blog hosting services to 20 million people.
While there are bigger blog hosts than WordPress.com, Blogger is still king in terms of number of blogs, and others are coming fast from behind, Tumblr is now very close to going past the 20 million blogs mark and overtaking WordPress.com, the open source WordPress software is still the most popular by far.
Even so, WordPress.com is still growing at a huge page, in fact, the last year was the biggest yet by a huge margin. With 20.3 million blogs hosted today, WordPress.com almost doubled in a year, despite the growing competition.
Since WordPress 0.7, the tool has underwent plenty of changes and upgrades. The upcoming WordPress 3.2 promises to be the fastest and most feature-rich yet.
Blogging is no longer the hottest thing on the web, but even with the rise of other, simpler publishing platforms, Facebook and Twitter for example, blogging tools still hold a very important role. Surprisingly perhaps, WordPress isn't making too much fuss about the birthday, there's not even a mention on its own blog.