Happy Tenth Anniversary, WordPress!

Tess Gadwa
CEO and Founder
Yes Exactly, Inc.

On May 27, 2013, the popular WordPress blogging and website platform celebrated its tenth anniversary. Founder Matt Mullenweg writes eloquently of the strength of the community which helped the software to grow and evolve:

WordPress’ strength lies in the diversity of its community. From the start, we wanted a low barrier to entry and we came up with our “famous 5 minute install”. This brought on board users from varied technical background: people who didn’t write code wanted to help make WordPress better. If you couldn’t write code, it didn’t matter: you could answer a question in the support forums, write documentation, translate WordPress, or build your friends and family a WordPress website. There is space in the community for anyone with a passion for WordPress.

Yes Exactly as a company would not exist without WordPress. Although we use other open source content management tools as the occasion demands, the usability and versatility of WordPress make it almost unmatched as a tool for rapidly deploying a full-featured, great-looking website that ordinary people can edit and add to on their own, without having to learn a new programming language.

Usability has been part of WordPress DNA since the get-go, and as Mullenweg recounts, it has occasionally resulted in some push-back from the occasionally cliquish development community. With over 66 million blogs in existence, WordPress is easily the most popular open-source blogging platform in existence today — and yet it is created and maintained in large part by a community of volunteers and passionate enthusiasts.

As Yes Exactly matures as a company, we hope to find ways to give back to the open source community that has given us so much. Chief among them, we are working on a set of tools to make it as easy for graphic designers to create great original custom website designs in WordPress as it is right now for bloggers to blog and programmers to write code using the same platform. The first designers will be testing an early release of the software later this week. We couldn’t be more excited!

I am a firm believer that the most powerful technology is not the slickest or the fastest or the most obscure and mystifying. It is that which can be got into the hands of the most people, to use and adapt as they see fit. Thanks again to Matt Mullenweg and everyone who brought WordPress into existence. You have changed the world for the better.