Today, WordPress powers more websites than any other content management system. It didn’t start that way though. The initial groundwork was laid for what was to become WordPress back in 2001. And the open source platform didn’t officially come into being until 2003. 

So, how does a CMS go from a simple blogging platform to a build-anything-you-can-imagine behemoth in just a couple decades? And why haven’t other website building technologies been able to do the same?

In this post, we’re going to look at a timeline of WordPress’s major milestones and history as well as where it stands today and the outlook for its future.

WordPress is the most popular content management system and website building technology in the world. More than 43% of websites today are built with WordPress, more than any other CMS. 

Learn more facts about WordPress: 

Curious about where WordPress came from and how it became such a powerful force in the website building space? Start here: 

Programmer Michel Valdrighi began working on a new blogging platform that would empower anyone to start their own blog. He came up with the name b2 by combining the word “blog” and “Song 2”, a song by Blur.

The name b2 was too short, so the platform was alternatively referred to as “Cafelog” and hosted on cafelog.com. 

b2/Cafelog was up against blogging giants like Blogger and Movable Type. However, people really loved the freedom and empowerment that came with using an intuitive tool like b2. The only problem was that Valdrighi stopped supporting it around 2002.

b2 was free to use and had a General Public License (GPL) license. With Valdrighi missing in action, this enabled other developers to step up, create a fork of b2, and develop their own software from it. 

There were a number of forks built from b2’s codebase. 

François Plaque, for instance, started b2evolution. Donncha Ó Caoimh started b2++. 

And Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little co-founded their own branch of b2 which would become WordPress.

Mullenweg’s and Little’s new b2 fork went live on SourceForge. The blogging platform was given the name “WordPress” by Mullenweg’s friend Christine Tremoulet.

Just as Valdrighi had set out to simplify blogging while providing a stable place to do it, Mullenweg and Little wanted WordPress to follow in those same footsteps. Not only that, they wanted WordPress to easily be customizable and extendable.

The first release of WordPress went live shortly after it was forked. It offered a simple blogging platform and interface with some coding upgrades from b2. 

After Version 0.7 shipped, Mullenweg got in touch with the other b2 forkers. Caoimh agreed to merge his b2++ fork with WordPress and joined the WordPress development team. Plaque, however, believed it would be too much work with little tradeoff, so he declined to bring b2evolution over.

The trend of naming releases after jazz musicians began with WordPress 1.0, which was named “Miles Davis”. 

This version brought significant advancements to the CMS, like SEO-friendly permalinks, comment moderation, and a cleaner file and directory structure.

The next few versions brought significant advancements in the form of plugins and themes. The first one came in the middle of 2004 when WordPress introduced the plugin architecture. This allowed users to extend and modify WordPress with plugins. 

WordPress introduced an improved theme system with Version 1.5. Along with introducing a new default theme called Kubrick, the new system enabled users to create templates for different parts of their site instead of being stuck with whatever the default theme provided.

In addition, pages were introduced. Up until this point, WordPress users only had posts to work with. But, with this addition, they could create full-fledged websites.

Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little co-founded Automattic. Its purpose was to democratize online publishing and make it simple and easy for anyone to develop an online presence. The company sought to do this by developing various products and services to support WordPress users.

In its Series A funding round, Automattic received $1,100,000. Although Automattic and WordPress are separate entities, this level of funding was a glimpse into how much promise WordPress showed even in its early days.

WordCamps are tech conferences that revolve around the WordPress ecosystem. Everyone from independent bloggers and site owners to professional plugin authors and agencies attends them.

Matt Mullenweg held the first one in San Francisco in 2006. There have been hundreds of these events since then.

Automattic officially registered the trademark for both the WordPress name as well as its logo. This enabled the company to use the WordPress trademark as it pleased while also granting licenses to others for commercial and non-commercial purposes upon request.

In its Series B round, Automattic raised $29,500,000 in funding. The New York Times was amongst the investors this time around.

A marketplace called FlashDen was founded in 2006. It picked up speed over the years, adding a new marketplace to its repertoire called ThemeForest in 2008. People could buy WordPress themes as well as themes for other platforms there.

In addition, FlashDen underwent a name change. The company became known from that point forward as Envato.

Although the WordPress theme directory had been around for some time, users no longer had to download theme files and upload them into WordPress. With Version 2.8, the theme directory was added to the dashboard and made theme installation possible with one click.

Envato introduced a new marketplace called CodeCanyon. Users could purchase plugins and scripts from the site for use inside of WordPress as well as other CMS and platforms.

The WordPress Foundation is a non-profit set up to promote the democratization of publishing through open-source technologies. Specifically, the Foundation supports the WordPress community. 

“The WordPress Foundation is here to ensure that open source software is part of the future. Human beings may have limited life spans, but our efforts don’t have to. Our organization wants to ensure that the source code for projects like WordPress will survive beyond the current contributor base, so we may create a stable web publishing platform for generations to come.”

Back in September 2010, Mullenweg announced that the WordPress trademark had been transferred from Automattic to the WordPress Foundation.

Here’s what the announcement said:

“Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company.”

WordPress may have begun as a simple blogging platform. However, the addition of pages to its capabilities enabled users to accomplish even more with the CMS starting in 2005.

Five years later, custom post types were introduced (along with multisite capabilities) in Version 3.0. This opened up the possibilities even further for users, allowing them to create content types for a wide range of use cases.

A team of WordPress theme developers called WooThemes created their very first plugin product in 2011. It was called WooCommerce. This plugin would enable users to add ecommerce functionality to their sites from within WordPress. 

Although some enhancements had been made to the WordPress UI over the years, it wasn’t until the Version 3.8 Charlie Parker update that it got a major revamp. 

In addition to redoing the look of the dashboard, it made WordPress responsive (at least what constituted responsive at the time).

Until this point, WordPress was supported by massive teams of volunteers and contributors. You’ll find endless evidence of this in each new release announcement, like this one for WordPress 3.5: 

But with how much WordPress was growing, more contributions were needed to sustain and elevate the momentum. As a result, the Five for the Future program was created. 

This program gave organizations (and individuals) a seat at the table. By contributing time or resources to the WordPress project, they’d have a stake in the platform’s future. Organizations were encouraged to assist in various ways, from testing and QA to community building.

Automattic made numerous acquisitions over the years. However, its acquisition of WooCommerce from WooThemes was one that users had been clamoring for. As Mullenweg explained in this video, WordCamp attendees always wanted to know:

“When are you gonna make it as easy to publish stores online as you’ve made it to publish websites?” 

The answer came in 2015 when WooCommerce joined the Automattic family. 

WordPress made different advancements to the page editing experience over the years. Yet, the WordPress text and WYSIWYG editor always left something to be desired, especially compared to visual website builders like Squarespace and Wix. 

In 2016, the Elementor page builder plugin was created to solve this problem. As the agency behind the plugin explains, Elementor was founded “as a way to make the web creation experience more accessible to professionals like them.”

The highly anticipated Version 5.0 went live with a visual, block-based editor called Gutenberg. 

The goal of the editor was to modernize the WordPress page creation experience. Unfortunately, the new editor received major backlash from the WordPress community, especially as it became the default editor in the CMS. 

To this day, Gutenberg receives a lot of criticism, with many users preferring to use the long-trusted classic editor or page builder plugins like Elementor instead.

Things seemed to get pretty quiet on the WordPress front after the Gutenberg release. 

Over the years, the WordPress team worked behind the scenes to improve the editor based on user feedback while making other incremental enhancements to the CMS. However, not a whole lot else happened. And that seemed to be just fine for WordPress as its dominance amongst website building technologies remained unshakeable. 

That is, until late 2024. Mullenweg and Automattic became embroiled in a public war and lawsuit with WP Engine. Although many WordPress users appear to be committed to the CMS, there’s a lot of talk about a change-up of leadership needed for WordPress.

You can read all about the WordPress/Automattic vs. WP Engine battle in the section above. However, it’s important to bring attention to this post published on the Automattic site in October as the trademark is a critical part of the history of WordPress.

In the post, Mullenweg claimed that the WordPress commercial license had never been transferred to the WordPress Foundation. That it only owned the trademark for the non-commercial license while Automattic retained the commercial one.

Automattic has steadily raised more and more money over the years. At the time of writing this, the total amount of money raised by Automattic is a whopping $985,899,968.

For the most part, WordPress has experienced an extraordinary number of wins compared to setbacks over the years. From a small b2 forking project in 2003 to the top content management system in 2025, WordPress has shown what a user-first open source platform should look like time and time again. 

Not only that, WordPress has empowered its community to contribute in a meaningful way. Whether it be contributing to the core or creating extensible themes and plugins, the community has a lot of control when it comes to what direction the platform goes in. 

But will it remain this way in the future? Despite the chaos swirling around Mullenweg in 2024 and 2025, the community seems determined to keep the WordPress dream alive.

New to WordPress and wondering how to get started? Here’s some further reading for you: