With the REST API<\/a> en route<\/em>, Matt Mullenweg openly targeting 50% market share<\/a> as a goal and with Automattic starting to flex their economic muscles<\/a>, there is a sense that the WordPress juggernaut \u2013 on both the open source and commercial side of the fence \u2013 is starting to pick up steam in a way that is fundamentally different to what has come before.<\/p>\n In this article, we’ll look back at the major events that led to WordPress becoming the world’s favorite CMS and close with some thoughts on what lies ahead.<\/p>\n Let’s take a trip down memory lane.<\/p>\n The market dominance of WordPress is so complete these days that many users may be blissfully unaware of its roots as the fork of a pretty obscure PHP blogging platform.<\/p>\n B2 Cafelog<\/a>\u00a0was originally developed by Michael Valdrighi in 2001, but by 2003 active development had seemingly been abandoned.<\/p>\n A\u00a0post<\/a> from\u00a0Matt Mullenweg<\/a>\u00a0bemoaning the lack of progress on the tool led\u00a0Mike Little<\/a>\u00a0to propose teaming up<\/a>\u00a0to take things forward, and the end result was a fork of B2\u00a0called WordPress<\/a>\u00a0which was launched onto an unsuspecting world in May of 2003.<\/p>\n The official 1.0 version<\/a> followed relatively closely thereafter in January 2004, with many of the features WordPress users have long since taken for granted, such as straightforward installation, comment moderation, search engine friendly permalinks and categories.<\/p>\n May 2004 saw the release of\u00a0Version 1.2 (Mingus)<\/a>\u00a0and the arrival of plugins, with the (in)famous Hello Dolly<\/a>\u00a0demo being put together by Mullenweg himself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Another familiar part of the WordPress landscape also came into being\u00a0that year with the launch of forum solution\u00a0bbPress<\/a>, which powers the WordPress.com<\/a>\u00a0and WordPress.org<\/a>\u00a0support forums to this day.<\/p>\n An early win for the nascent platform came mid-way through 2004. Poorly received changes<\/a> to Moveable Type’s licensing and pricing structure gave WordPress a huge boost as disaffected bloggers went looking for an alternative, open source solution.<\/p>\n Looking back at those first eighteen months, it’s fair to say that WordPress came out of the blocks with something of a bang. The big leaps, however, were just around the corner.<\/p>\n 2005 was a landmark year for WordPress in several key respects. One of the most far-reaching of those was the creation of Automattic<\/a> as a separate commercial entity in August 2005 and the official launch of WordPress.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Matt Mullenweg had the vision early on to see that the GPL license<\/a> was capable of supporting both an active open source project and a completely distinct commercial entity that could leverage its power.<\/p>\n Ten years down the line, with an entire industry<\/a> having grown up around WordPress in the interim, this feels like a natural state of affairs but it’s easy to forget what a radical step \u2013 and\u00a0commercial gamble \u2013 this represented at the time.<\/p>\n An initial funding round of $1.5 million<\/a> put Automattic on a financially solid footing early on, and their commitment to supporting the development of WordPress as an open source platform was quickly shown with their involvement in a number of high-profile releases.<\/p>\n WordPress 1.5 (Strayhorn)<\/a>\u00a0was a particularly noteworthy version, as it brought theming functionality and static pages to the table.<\/p>\n The separation of design and functionality that theming ushered in\u00a0\u2013 highlighted in the inaugural default theme\u00a0Kubrick<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 was a key factor in driving uptake among developers and designers worldwide, and opened the door for future monetization efforts.<\/p>\n 2005 also saw the launch of anti-comment spam plugin Akismet<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 subsequently spun off into its own standalone service<\/a>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0and initial work on Multisite<\/a> precursor WordPressMU<\/a> by Automattic’s first hire Donncha O’Caoimh<\/a>.<\/p>\n In contrast to the fairly extraordinary amount of activity in 2005, the next two years were\u00a0largely ones of consolidation and slow iterative improvement on both the commercial and open source sides of the platform.<\/p>\n Notable additions in terms of functionality during that period included tagging, widgets, pretty URLs, spell checking, assorted speed improvements and update notifications.<\/p>\n The WordPress Plugin Directory<\/a> also established itself as the official go-to repository for plugins during this time.<\/p>\n In terms of outreach, 2006 was also notable for the first ever WordCamp<\/a> in San Francisco \u2013 the beginning of a series of events that continue to galvanize the community worldwide to this day.<\/p>\n On the Automattic side of the equation, 2006 saw the appointment of Toni Schneider<\/a> as full-time CEO and one of the company’s\u00a0first major purchases in Gravatar<\/a>.<\/p>\n As\u00a02007 came to a close, there was no longer any doubt that WordPress had\u00a0emerged as a significant online presence, but could it continue its upwards trajectory?<\/p>\n 2008 and 2009 saw some major revamps on the WordPress backend, beginning with the Happy Cog<\/a>-led redesign<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0WordPress 2.5 (Brecker)<\/a>.<\/p>\n The initial admin overhaul was met with mixed reviews<\/a>, leading to some soul-searching in the form of a usability testing report code-named Crazyhorse<\/a>. This\u00a0eventually morphed into the more considered backend changes that were such a feature of WordPress 2.7 (Coltrane)<\/a>.<\/p>\n The functionality kept on coming throughout this period with features such as the Shortcode API, post revisions, built-in plugin installations, and sticky posts all making their debut.<\/p>\n The lead-up to the 3.0 release saw significant additions, such as the built-in theme installer in version 2.8 (Baker)<\/a> and image editing in version 2.9 (Carmen)<\/a>.<\/p>\n [wpvideo NBZ853Xn]<\/p>\n This period also saw the continued growth of the Plugin Directory and the official launch of the Theme Directory<\/a> \u2013 a huge step forward in terms of quality standards and design focus for the platform.<\/p>\n Automattic was also busy throughout this time, having secured a Series B funding round of $29.5 million<\/a> from a heavyweight group of investors including the New York Times<\/a> and Polaris<\/a>. A small chunk of that change was quickly spent on acquiring the WordPressMU-based social network BuddyPress<\/a>.<\/p>\n By the end of 2009, WordPress had firmly established itself as a favorite<\/a> in the minds of developers, though overall market share<\/a> was still relatively low. That was soon to change.<\/p>\n 2010 to 2012 saw a number of landmark events for WordPress as a piece of software, a platform and an idea.<\/p>\n The WordPress Foundation<\/a> was officially set up as a charitable organization by Matt Mullenweg in 2010, with the aim of securing WordPress’ long-term future as an independent open source software project:<\/p>\n The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the software projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As part of this process, the foundation officially acquired the rights<\/a> to the WordPress logo and trademark.<\/p>\n For obvious reasons, the lines between Automattic and WordPress continue to be slightly hazy at times<\/a> to this day, but the establishing of the WordPress Foundation and assignment of rights went a long way towards formalizing the division between the two at a key time for the platform.<\/p>\n 2010 also saw the arrival of a major version in WordPress 3.0 (Thelonius)<\/a>.<\/p>\n The inclusion of custom post types in this release represented another large step on the road to WordPress becoming a truly multi-purpose CMS, and the integration of WordPressMU into core under the guise of Multisite<\/a> brought a whole new level of power and flexibility to site owners.<\/p>\n Version 3.0 also marked the beginning of a re-organization period for the software project behind the scenes, with a renewed focus on non-core related areas such as the Codex, theme directory and other areas of the overall WordPress experience.<\/p>\n Microsoft’s 2010 migration of its thirty million Windows Live Spaces users<\/a> to WordPress.com represented a major coup for the platform as a whole, and by the end of the year WordPress had soared up to 14.7% of overall market share<\/a>.<\/p>\n 2011 also witnessed the first official WordPress user and developer survey<\/a>,\u00a0which showcased the increasing viability of the platform as a means of generating serious revenue for businesses worldwide.<\/p>\n The next couple of years saw WordPress consolidating its position\u00a0as the world’s leading CMS platform.<\/p>\n A slew of additional functionality emerged throughout this period, including the new media manager and audio and video support.<\/p>\n Efforts to improve the backend user experience continued with ongoing improvements to the theme customizer, the introduction of Distraction Free Writing mode and a major responsive reboot of the admin interface in WordPress 3.8 (Parker)<\/a>.<\/p>\n Under the hood, WordPress 3.9 (Smith)<\/a> saw some major improvements on the automatic version update front and the introduction of compatibility with Facebook’s HipHop Virtual Machine<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 a shift that put WordPress firmly at the cutting edge of PHP development.<\/p>\n Big moves were afoot on the Automattic side of things as well, with Matt Mullenweg stepping up as CEO<\/a>\u00a0in 2014 as the company raised a cool $160 million in funding<\/a> to put its valuation at a staggering $1.16 billion dollars<\/a>.<\/p>\n Automattic also acquired\u00a0Longreads<\/a>\u00a0in 2014, a move that perhaps signals interest in a longer term content play by the company.<\/p>\n This period also saw WordPress consolidate its position as the world’s most popular CMS, leaving rival contenders trailing in the dust as WordPress soared to 23% of market share<\/a>.<\/p>\n As with ten years before, 2015 has all the makings of a landmark year for WordPress.<\/p>\n The platform is on the verge of integrating the REST API into core, a move that opens it up to a wider programmatic world and that could see it transform into a fully-fledged application framework<\/a>.<\/p>\n In an interview with Adam Silver on the KitchensinkWP podcast<\/a>, Mullenweg outlined the scope of his ambitions and explicitly targeted overall market dominance as a future goal:<\/p>\n The next goal is the majority of websites. We want to get to 50%+ and there\u2019s a lot of work between now and then. As the percentage increases, it gets harder and harder to grow the market share, and we have to grow the market share by doing things we haven\u2019t done in the past \u2013 really thinking about the onboarding process, really thinking about the integration with social networks, and with how WordPress works on touch devices, which is going to be the predominant computing platform of the future. These things are going to be really important.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This year has also seen the acquisition of WooCommerce<\/a> by Automattic, which puts some real muscle behind WordPress’ attempts to compete with eCommerce giants such as Shopify<\/a> and Magento<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/wordpress-org.png\")
2003\u20132004: A New Platform is Born<\/h2>\n
![\"B2](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Screen-Shot-2015-06-05-at-11.20.19-800x540.png\")
![\"Matt](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/hello-dolly-plugin.png\")
2005\u20132007: Giant Steps<\/h2>\n
![\"Screen](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Screen-Shot-2015-06-05-at-11.50.081-800x396.png\")
2008\u20132009: The Training Wheels Come Off<\/h2>\n
![\"WordPress](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/wordpress-2-5.png\")
2010\u20132011: Growing Up in Public<\/h2>\n
2012\u20132014: An Increasingly Mature Platform<\/h2>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/wordpress-3-8.jpg\")
2015: Making Its Move<\/h2>\n