WordPress is so rich in features now that it’s hard to believe what it was like in the beginning. When it first was released, it didn’t even support Pages, just Posts. Despite this limitation, it was the best thing going at the time.
WordPress was an outgrowth of b2/cafelog, which was the precursor to WordPress in 2001 and was installed on about 2,000 blogs by 2003. At that time, there were a few other blogging platforms (one called Movable Type was among them) and WordPress was a rather obscure one of those options. In 2004 though, more people started paying attention to it as they became disillusioned with changes that Movable Type was making. B2/cafelog was discontinued, and that became WordPress.
The first version of WordPress included an admin interface but not much more than a title field, a category field, a field for text and an excerpt along with a “Blog this!” publish button. In 2004, plugin architecture was introduced. Since its beginning, WordPress was imagined as a free and open-source platform. And this plugin architecture allowed other users to add on to the original functionality. These early developers wrote their own plugins and shared them with the rest of the community. With more members of the community using it and adding to it, WordPress grew over all the other blogging platforms.
In 2005, more improvements were made, including adding categories and tags to posts. More could be done right from the dashboard instead of having to navigate away, like to the comments page to delete a comment. Even in the early days, spam was a problem! The Akismet anti-span plugin that everyone uses nowadays was released in 2005.
Over the years, the structure and ownership of WordPress became more formalized. In 2012, image galleries became the norm. In 2013, WordPress came with new automatic update features that allowed WordPress to automatically update a site’s software for minor updates. It was at this time that WordPress started to become the clear leader in blogging software. Now, it’s not just a blogging software. Millions of people, including our own company and our clients, rely on WordPress for their informational websites and ecommerce.
As of February 2017, WordPress is used by 58.7 percent of all the websites whose content management system is known. This is 27.5% of the top 10 million websites in existence.
So can you trust WordPress? Absolutely! The amount and type of plugins now available is stunning. If a plugin doesn’t exist for what you want to be able to do on your site, developers like Limelight Department, who specialize in WordPress, can pretty easily create one.
WordPress is the richest and most supported website platform available. Limelight Department believes in it so much that it’s the only platform we work with. We are very familiar with the plugin marketplace and since we design our own plugins, there’s no limit to what a WordPress website designed by Limelight Department can do.
