WordPress turns 20 this year. And next year it will be 21, but that's how we are with ephemeris. We like round dates.
The worldwide WordPress community is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the day WordPress was launched on 27 May 2023. Two decades ago, WordPress debuted with Texturize, XHTML 1.1, manual excerpts and a new administration interface.
WordPress has set up an official anniversary website where updates will be posted on how the community can participate in upcoming events. The hashtag #WP20 will be used on social media to mark these event-related actions. Those organising celebratory community events can list them on the website by submitting the related information via a form.
Among the first actions is one by the Museum of Block Art (MOBA), a WordPress-powered site featuring unique artworks made with Gutenberg, the WordPress block editor. Currently, the site has opened a call for artwork submissions with the theme"20 years of WordPress".
A playlist of 46 songs has also been created on Spotify. From Miles Davis to Mikhail "Misha" Alperin, this playlist celebrates 20 years of WordPress releases and includes one song for each of the 45 jazz artists selected to represent each of the releases of each version of WordPress.
If you want to join in the celebration by adding a 20th anniversary logo to your site, you can download them here.
WordPress is also launching a new 20th anniversary wapuu. The mascot wears a party hat and a balloon with the anniversary logo and has been created by WordPress contributor Emalina "Ema" DeRosia.
The idea of creating a WordPress mascot was born at WordCamp Tokyo 2009 and finally illustrator Kazuko Kaneuchi came up with the design we know today. Here's the story of Wapuu told in a better way.
WordPress was born in 2003 when Mike Little y Matt Mullenweg created a fork of the defunct b2/cafelog CMS created by French PHP programmer Programmer Michel Valdrighi in 2001.
The need for an elegant and well-designed personal publishing system was evident even back then. Today, WordPress is based on PHP and MySQL, licensed under GPLv2, and is also the platform of choice for creating a large number of the sites on the web.
To date, WordPress is the runaway leader. It is used in 43.1% of all the pages published on the Internet, which means a market share of 63.4%. Far ahead of all other content managers with Shopify in second place, with just 3.8% of pages. Source: W3Techs.
This open source WordPress project has evolved progressively over time, with the support of expert and enthusiastic developers, designers, scientists, bloggers, etc. WordPress offers the possibility for anyone to create and share any content. People with little experience in technology, design or programming can use it "just like that". Install and publish and the more experienced can customise it almost without limits.
