History of WordPress
The WordPress timeline is not particularly old. In fact the evolution of WordPress over such a short time is really quite staggering.
The timeline shows that WordPress started life as a blogging control tool to manage the typography of blogs. That would have been in about 1997. In time, it became a full blog design tool. Companies such as Realitus started to strip its functionality to access the dynamism of WordPress and use it to power websites. The development of the tool continues to grow and supercede other website platforms.
But this only states a kind of usage history. The reason the use of WordPress has taken off and hit this level of momentum is because it is a better way of doing things for everyone involved.
Website owners can control their websites themselves. Users can interact with the web and search engines can find, read and see the websites easily. Designers can make changes, support is free and practically automatic, as is platform development. It is an open source initiative, it has a development life of its own and an almost vertical development curve at the moment.
As a user, you have to have a pretty good excuse not to like it. As an organisation you have to have a damn good excuse not to use it. WordPress is massively cheaper, immeasurably better and absolutely relevant.
The Story so far….
So back in the day, WordPress was only to do with blogging. Blogging itself started to crystlise in 1983. There was a mish-mash of software and uses all being stretched beyond their own remit. They tended to underpin defined ‘digital communities’. Some years ago at BP we used a system such as this on the global intranet to allow initiatives in e.g. drilling in Azerbaijan available to drillers in the Pacific and elsewhere in the world.
In time they commonly took the form of bulletin boards or similar interactive web sites. Increasingly, more flexibility was built into these bulletin boards where threads around a given subject attracted comment. In due course certain users would control threads on pet-subjects and indeed whole bulletin boards became an extention of a singular view.
So this type of activity became distilled into a ‘Weblog’ (later restated as an active movement as in ‘we blog’ shortened to ‘blog’) although the term was not defined. It was effectively online journalism. By 1994, the term had begun to take shape deep within that element of the web community.
Early blogs were updateable parts within common websites. These attracted dedicated tools to assist their production. WordPress was originally one of these focussing on typography. Such tools helped to define the standard shape of a blog – indexed in reverse date order and by category. All in all, it opened up the channel to non-technical users and into the hands of anyone with a computer and very basic computer skills.
Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs. Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, such as WordPress, or on regular web hosting services.
In 2004, the role of blogs moved in to the establishment as political consultants, news services and political candidates saw it as a preferred tool for outreach and opinion forming. Even politicians not actively campaigning, such as the UK’s Labour Party’s MP Tom Watson, began to blog to bond with constituents.
The medium received more credibility with The Baghdad Blogger who circumvented every global news organ and reported directly to the public. Soon-after politicians, newspapers and journalists were becoming increasingly paranoid about bloggers and adopting the tool themselves.
By 2006, WordPress had grown to become a sophisticated blogging platform. At that point Realitus has been interested in WordPress for its distribution and viral marketing potential. It occurred to us that one could use the core components of such a tool to operate as what we called a Newsengine. This was a tool whereby a corporation could generate news for themselves, either directly or commissioned via PR companies of copywriters. This tool would not only generate web copy, but could be developed to push the content out to journalists.
Our first development of this was for Anti Copying In Design (ACID). We developed a series of html newsletters, distributed to members, stakeholders, governments and press contacts. The HTML newsletter links directly to the newsdesk and the functions of the Blog platform are reinterpreted as indexing and search tools.
Others followed our lead in developing tools and plugins around the WordPress platform. There are indeed dedicated online magazine designs, and corporate comms tools all built on this. Most recently the Number 10 Downing Street website has been developed on this platform.
We are very proud to have had a small part in the evolution of WordPress. We are even keener to reinforce that involvement into the future and work with our customers to liberate their use of the web and bring their communications in line with the way the world now works
