WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. Of all existing sites on CMS, which are known to Google and not online stores, 39% work exactly on WordPress. No matter how much they criticize the engine for slowness and imperfect architecture, its popularity in the world is constantly growing. Let’s understand why it is so attractive and what opportunities are inherent in it.
In 2003, American programmer Matt Mullenweg created the first version of WordPress based on CMS b2. The project was born from the idea of making an engine for his blog, but very quickly outgrew the pet-project stage and came to the attention of the then incredibly popular CNET project. Matt worked for CNET for a while, and then founded his own company Automatic and immersed himself in the popularization and development of WordPress.
The CMS gradually grew in features:
- 2004 saw the introduction of plugin support;
- 2005 – themes;
- 2007 – autosave and spell check;
- 2009 – widgets, auto-updates, nested comments, API;
- 2010 – multisite, post customization, menus;
- 2011 – kernel rework, noticeable increase in performance and radical changes in the interface with a focus on users with no development experience.
- Since 2012, updates began to be released more often, each one contains dozens of innovations, which can be listed for a very long time. Over the years, WordPress has grown from an engine for blogs without programming and development knowledge into a flexible CMS for creating commercial sites and media. Support for plugins and extensions allows you to customize WordPress almost without limitations, although online stores on it is still better not to do – there are more suitable solutions for them.
WordPress out of the box is a full-fledged blog with the simplest possible interface. Therefore, digital newcomers sometimes mistakenly believe that this engine is not suitable for large projects. But only big brands think otherwise, it is not for nothing that Coca-Cola, Samsung, Mercedes-Benz brands used WordPress for their projects. It is also the basis for the official website of Sweden, LinkedIn, WSJ, Forbes, Toyota Brazil, Vogue and hundreds of other resources known to most active Internet users.
