More than 100 people will gather at Belfast’s WordCamp this weekend at Queens University, and on Sunday they will celebrate the 15th birthday of WordPress, the phenomenally successful online publishing platform that now hosts — or ‘powers’ — just over 30% of the world’s websites.
The event is already sold out, so you can’t just join the party. Unless, that is, you are interested in becoming a WordPress contributor, in which case a handful of places is still open for the free ‘contributor event’ at the Farset Labs in the city later this afternoon.
On 27 May 2003, software developer Matt Mullenweg launched the first version of a computer programme which went on to revolutionise publishing. Fifteen years later, WordPress is the engine behind 30% of the world’s websites, powering major media and e-commerce sites, as well as small blogs, the personal projects that inspired its creation.
Irish web development and host Blacknight is main sponsor of WordCamp and a big supporter of WordPress. Chief executive Michele Neylon puts the platform’s success down to its origin as a community project — open-source, free to all, and maintained and developed by volunteers.
No one company ‘owns’ the WordPress software in the way, for example, that Microsoft Office or Apple’s iOS are licensed and sold. Instead, WordPress is licensed under the GNU General Public License, which requires that it be free for anyone to copy, distribute or modify the software.
In Association with
Free to download and easy to install, WordPress was built to run with other open-source tools, on what is known as the LAMP stack: Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), MySQL (database), and PHP (programming language). All of this software is free to copy and install and has gone on to dominate the web world for similar reasons — for example, almost half of all web servers run on Apache.
To that package of free website software, WordPress added a killer application: a content management system (CMS). The key to the success and utility of a CMS is that it separates the site code from the content of the site, avoiding the cumbersome and repetitive coding of all content elements, such as pictures and text, involved in html markup language, the sort of site built with other popular programmes such as Adobe’s proprietary, and expensive, Dreamweaver app.
Powerful And Flexible
Says Neylon, who recalls a steady migration of websites from platforms like Blogspot (Blogger) to self-hosted WordPress in the early days: “The initial movement came from bloggers who had outgrown those services and wanted more freedom to develop their sites. But we soon saw small businesses and website developers turn to WordPress also, not just because it was free but because it was powerful and flexible as well.
“The WordPress dashboard was easy to master and teach, so that relatively non-technical people could control their own content and keep their websites up to date. But the back-end familiarity didn't come at the price of forcing everyone to be the same.
“From its earliest days WordPress was designed for extensibility. A proliferation of independently developed themes and plugins brought support for a variety of types of website. WordPress became more than an application: it is a platform for any type of web application you can imagine.”
Despite the source code being free and open to change, Mullenweg’s company, Automattic, makes money from it. That comes from charging for expertise, and as WordPress.com is now the sixth largest web platform in terms of traffic, with 141 million unique visitors per month, it’s no surprise that Automattic was valued at $1.16 billion in 2014.
The company has 720 employees, most of whom work from their homes, spread across 50 countries around the world.
Photo: WordCamp at QUB
