WordPress: a little over 130 years in the making

March 25, 2021
WordPress evolution: from years of development effort to a leading content management system.

Hear ye, hear ye! Ye olde WordPresse has a new version! My lord, would ye like to update!

That could have been the official notification for WordPress if you would have been there right from  the start. Well, almost, since that was Middle English, from 700 years ago, and since WordPress is around from the 1900, it would have sounded pretty much the same as it does today, give or take some slang here and there. 

But of course, this is not at all true, given the fact that the internet has been around only since 1991. The 112 years of WordPress development refers to the study that OpenHub.net put forward when calculating the cost of making WordPress a reality, both from a monetary point of view and an estimated effort in a temporal sense. With all the code present on the site, the codebase size totals up to over 1.3 million lines, and it would have taken a staggering 382 years. So we can say that the popular CMS does deserve its popularity, given all the hard work that has been put into its WordPress development.

Of course, these numbers only serve us to see the hard work that the developers at WordPress continue to do day by day, year by year, version by version. We know that nowadays it is the most reliable content management system and even though it may seem a bit complicated at first, it does pay off. After a bit of a learning curve, anybody can start using it and take advantage of its powerful engine that is hard at work behind the scenes.

The engine running behind it has been running smoothly since 2003, making the CMS actually 17 years, a bit more young than the 130 years that we first mentioned. And again, the “engine” WordPress is actually built with is actually made with PHP and MySQL and it is licensed under the GPLv2, which means it is free to use and modify by anyone.This can be considered as another reason for just picking your stuff and embracing the possibilities of WordPress without worrying about legal issues as it would be with other CMS-type websites. This also allows the existence of user-created plugins. These, of course, extend the possibilities of what WordPress can do.  Yoast SEO, Akismet, Contact Form 7 and Advanced Custom Fields are only some of the acclaimed plugins that are trusted throughout the community, and us at LadderWP  can vouch for them.

Even more, we, as a team, can vouch for WordPress in its entirety. Being user oriented, our partners can effortlessly add their own content, all while we do our magic and build the actual structure of the website.

Want to see us in action? Let’s talk!