June 7, 2011. Paul Hixon
credit: qthomasbowerThe history of WordPress goes back to 2003, when a single piece of code was created to enhance typography in everyday writing. Since this time, it has become the largest self-hosted blogging tool worldwide.
Web sites in the millions use this tool and it is viewed by tens of millions of us daily. It comes with many plugins including bulk email marketing software. It is an open source content management system so many people worldwide work on it.
Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little first released the application on May 27, 2003. It was created as a fork of b2/cafelog, which was used on about 2,000 blogs. Movable Type had its licensing terms for a competing package changed in 2004, causing many influential users to move to WordPress. In October 2009, the Open Source CMS Market Share Report concluded that the application had the greatest brand strength in its sector.
In July 2007, Mr. Mullenweg announced that themes with sponsored links would no longer be hosted in the official theme directory. Subsequently, no new themes were accepted until the new theme directory opened the following July. These themes are extremely editable in a similar way to email marketing templates. All uploaded themes are now vetted by an automated program and a person. More than 200 themes were removed in December 2008 due to non-compliance with GPL License requirements.
An exploit in January 2007 led to the targeting and attack of many commercial blogs that included AdSense and many well-known SEO blogs. The company has been criticized for its track record regarding security. The architecture has been blamed for the difficulty in writing code secure from SQL injection vulnerability.
As an Open Source project, anyone can use the application at no charge, whether a personal blogger or a Fortune 100 company. Currently, more than 13 percent of the one million largest Web sites use this application. Most recent in the history of WordPress is version 3.0, which had over 12.5 million downloads as of August 2010.
Updated June 7, 2011. Published May 9, 2011. Paul Hixon
