Nine years ago today @mikelittlezed1 floated an idea which eventually became WordPress. #thanksmike http://t.co/teYbVHX8

Wednesday, 25 January 2012 10:52 via Firefox Share (alpha)ReplyRetweetFavorite

@simond

Simon Dickson

WordPress is really shaping up, and is an evermore stable and functional CMS platform. The statistics continue to be astonishing, with more than 70 million sites around the world. That’s nearly 16% of the web!

WordPress is supporting a whole industry of WordPress experts, including me: I’m just starting my fourth year as an independent WordPress specialist.

Praise must go as usual to the fantastic community around WordPress, the singular vision of Matt Mullenweg, and the awesome power of the GNU GPL open source license.

With version 3.4 currently in the making, I predict it will be another great year for WordPress.

I still marvel at the incredible distance it has come. I’m also still proud that I had a part in its birth. But even more, I marvel at the wonderful contribution of all the WordPress community make to this fantastic project.

A client said to me this morning “This WordPress is brilliant isn’t it?” As I helped him set up his fourth WordPress site. You can’t get much clearer praise than that.

So raise a virtual beer (or other non-alcoholic beverage if, like me, you are teetotal) to WordPress, the community, and to another year.

Update: I just spotted this tweet from Andrew Nacin:

At more than 20 million WordPress.com blogs, that puts WordPress at north of 45 million sites. Wowza. Happy birthday indeed.

Friday, 27 May 2011 15:47 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@nacin

Andrew Nacin

Wow! 25 million standalone WordPress sites plus 20 million WordPress.com sites! No wonder it powers more than 14 percent of the web.

WordPress is now a mature CMS platform driving 13% of the web! It is used for an astonishing array of very different web sites around the world, from the humblest one person blog to award-winning education sites, celebrity sites, newspapers, and even world leaders!

WordPress is supporting a whole industry of WordPress experts, including me: I’m now in my third year as an independent WordPress specialist.

I believe that WordPress has achieved this massive success in no small way because of the fantastic community around it, the keen-eyed vision of Matt Mullenweg, and the awesome power of the GNU GPL open source license.

With version 3.1 just around the corner, I predict it will be another great year for WordPress.

It’s best to read the notes in the “Notes on slide x” tab so that everything makes sense! I also link to some of the plugins I used at the end.

Amazingly, the presentation features on the SlideShare home page today along with a couple of other presentations from WordCamp UK! See the “featured” section in the right hand column. Woo Hoo!

I have still to finish my write-up of the weekend, but will hopefully get that done ‘real soon’.

As the tickets did not completely sell out, we are making the last few available on the door, as we did last year.

You must email me (mike at my domain ) to reserve a ticket, and then turn up on Saturday morning with your £30 cash.

To recap, WordCamp UK is this weekend, July 17th and 18th, at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School which is in Manchester city centre, a few minutes walk from the main Piccadilly train Station.

There are four simultaneous tracks : General & user, Specialist & developer, Miscellaneous & spontaneous and a ‘Genius Bar’ (a range of WordPress experts available to advice attendees on a one-to-one basis).

I look forward to seeing you there.

Tickets are on sale now just £30. That’s £30 for two full days of meeting fellow WordPress users, publishers, designers, and developers.

The unconference is being held on the weekend of July 17th and 18th at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School which is in Manchester city centre and just a few minutes walk from the main Piccadilly train Station.

There are four simultaneous tracks this year: General & user, Specialist & developer, Miscellaneous & spontaneous and a ‘Genius Bar’ (a range of WordPress experts available to advice attendees on a one-to-one basis).

I’ll be there, of course, and will be presenting on Sunday. I’ll probably hang around the Genius bar at times too. It will be a great weekend, if you are a WordPress user, developer, or designer, or are just considering using WordPress, you should come along.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Now WordPress is a grown up CMS capable of much more than just blogging, but I noticed that one of the key points of that release still holds true.

New Administration Interface — We’ve made it as simple as possible, and no more.

I’m eagerly looking forward to the 3.0 release, that is just around the corner.

In it,  Gurbir Singh of astrotalkuk interviews Matt and I.  We discuss the history of WordPress,  the open source philosophy behind it,  a little about our backgrounds, fame, and… astronomy.

Go watch the interview, it’s pretty cool.

It was seven years ago that I made the the comment on Matt’s blog that started the whole thing off.

These days WordPress celebrates its birthday on May 27th, the anniversary of the first WordPress release.

I’m really looking forward to the future WordPress, especially the new merged with mu version.

Update: I accidentally left this post in draft mode, so I guess it didn’t appear at the right time.

The problem came courtesy of a tracking a trunk checkout of a plugin. A change got checked in which broke some functionality I was using, and when I updated I picked up the change and didn’t check my site.

I really should know better. My only excuse: I have been out of the office for a couple of days and busy working for clients.