If there was a question that ever made me start feeling old, it might be this one. Last week, Marcel Bootsman asked via Twitter, “Why did you start to use WordPress?”
WordPress community members chimed in with all sorts of reasons for hopping aboard, and Jeff Chandler of WP Mainline shared his journey on his site. These are the sort of discussions of nostalgia that I live for. What follows is my story.
I began blogging in 2003. A friend had introduced me to a now-defunct service called Expage. We mostly used it similarly to the early Myspace craze, adding things such as shout-outs to friends, random GIFs, scrolling marquee text, and midi files that blared as soon as a visitor landed on the page. But, I soon began learning how to link together multiple “Expages” (you only got one page), eventually building something of a journal.
After realizing the limitations of creating multiple accounts and passwords for different pages, I found Yahoo! GeoCities. After a short-lived stint with the service and being stifled by its roadblocks, I soon upgraded to a web hosting plan offered by Yahoo! with full PHP support. That meant I could do dynamic things like having multiple text files to store my blog post entries.
Thus, began my journey into building my own blogging system. Over the next couple of years, I kept my online journal open to the world with what felt like duct tape and old-fashioned grit. I tried WordPress at some point along the way and took a dive into PHP-Nuke and a couple of others. I then jumped back to my own system. I knew just enough PHP to be a flashing beacon for hacker-bots to push those little blue pills if they had ever bothered looking in my direction. Of course, my blog was so obscure that its glaring security holes did not register on any radar.
It was a week after I turned 21. On May 8, 2005, I had decided to get serious — yet again — about fixing my digital playground of a website. I would ditch any efforts of moving everything over to WordPress or another CMS. I was a lone wolf and was going to trek into the world wild web with nothing but my existing knowledge and instincts.
It was a fun era on the web for me. I was also a college student with an ever-changing list of interests, often varying by the day. Building a custom blogging system has never been an easy feat, and managing it all through plain text files had become a burden.
A mere five days later, I caved on my dream of managing a custom platform, but I needed to do so for my own sanity.
I simply began using WordPress because it made it easy to manage blog posts.
There were no special features like the editor, custom post types, or anything else that has brought so many others to the project. It was simply having a nicely organized posts management screen and the output of those posts on the front end. Relative to other systems at the time, it was also easy to install.
At the time, I probably did not think much of it. It was just another project in a line of others that I had tested, but I am happy I took the leap. WordPress has given me a career and, often, a purpose in life. It allowed me to grow as a developer, designer, and writer.
It may be blasphemy to say such things in WordPress circles, but my personal blog no longer runs on our beloved platform. After all these years, I have come full circle. My original goal was to build a flat-file blogging system, even though I did not know there was a name for such a thing back in the early-to-mid 2000s. I also did not have the requisite knowledge to build it at the time. However, in 2018, I coded my own system from scratch, and I loved every minute of that initial build. In part, I had a new project to tinker with, but it also carried a bit of the nostalgic factor of re-pioneering my early foray into the web.
While a custom blogging platform works for my own purposes, it makes me appreciate WordPress even more. It is hard to understand how much work goes into something as seemingly simple as the front-end architecture until you build it from the ground up. And, let us just skip over any talk of creating a secure and accessible admin interface that is user-friendly.
For any serious endeavor, WordPress is still my go-to solution — my personal site is a playground where I can afford to break things, after all. After our 16-year relationship, I do not see that changing at any point soon. As always, something exciting is around the corner. The platform keeps me on my toes, and I cannot imagine a world without it.
How or why did you begin using WordPress?
The first time I tried to dive into WordPress, I said “Why would anyone use this over Movable Type?” to give you an idea of when that was.
I took a long hiatus from building sites, but once I found a personal project that interested me, in 2016, that’s when I reached for WordPress, and it’s been all up from there. A long journey from a starter theme to building fully custom themes, and I’m finally diving into plugins and custom blocks (thanks in large part to what I’ve read on WP Tavern).
Like a lot of other people, May 2004, after the Movable Type Pricing Kerfuffle.
Just what you said (Michael Pate). I miss MT as it was far superior, in my honest opinion. Movable Type was absolutely stupid what they did!! So, enter, WordPress. At the time, I was also heavy into Joomla too–still am actually, but I knew I had to start getting into WP as well.
The Movable Type folk should write a book on how to kill your own platform in one easy step.
When I first started out, I remember a lot of people recommending it instead of WordPress. But it looked pretty clear back then that they were doing a lot to hurt their own platform/business. I never thought they would completely kill it like they have though.
They weren’t the only platform to practically destroy themselves though. I really liked the SMF community back then, but it shot itself clear in the face multiple times, and is now just a shadow of it’s former self.
The WordPress community has made plenty of oopsies over the years, but they’ve always been kept well on track IMO. I think Matt Mullenweg has done an excellent job of keeping the basic project loosely direction heading in a coherent direction. Without that guidance I think it could easily have plowed off a cliff like some of these other platforms did.
Seriously…that is very true and would make for a great book on how to kill your own platform!
As for WordPress, I believe the one big factor in their success was going Open Source.
Lots of platforms are open source, but managed to kill themselves off. They just do it slower than their proprietary cousins.
I was using blogger.com and switched sometime around 2005. Don’t actually remember why, but I seem to recall something changed that made it insufficient for my purposes. Perhaps something to do with the Google purchase of that company.
I created a custom theme for WordPress that matched the theme I had in blogger.com, and am still using it today, lol.
I usually used to use Blogger. In the past, Blogger was always an always go for me.
Until I started to worry about whether Blogger would be closed as Google closed several other services, especially when I saw the Blogger android app which was not active (this was before Blogger started updating again in 2020).
I switched to WordPress because I saw WordPress as having active development and having a lively community.
I started way back in 2008 and it was a personal blog on a managed free blog provider with a subdomain (blog.co.in). Since then a lot have changed but not my blogging platform. I currently own over 30 websites and most of these are on WordPress.
I found WordPress (the software) in 2016 after trying several other free website builders, all of which came with their own limits that I kept breaching. I haven’t stopped using it since.
I started Using WordPress as there were lot of template options available which I can choose to build my own website.
I had built my own news handling systems via the SMF forum software. But that program was never intended for the purpose of handling news, and the interface for it was very awkward.
I saw recommendations online for using various bits of software for this. The most common recommendation was for Joomla. But WordPress looked much simpler to work with and was growing in popularity, whereas Joomla looked like it was on a downward trajectory. Apparently I picked the winning horse in that race 🙂 Then the popularity of WordPress exploded and I’ve been riding that wave ever since.
WordPress 2.2 was the first one I installed. I installed it on my personal site when version 2.3 came out and it’s been running on it ever since.
I probably would have moved all my personal stuff off of WordPress a while back. I’d prefer to custom build my own stuff now, as I can make it do exactly what I need it to do and nothing else. But I keep using WordPress since it’s what I use in my professional life and it’s useful to demo that I use the product myself as well as work with it for a living.
You got in just when widgets were moved out of a plugin and into core. That was a huge transition for WordPress to doing a lot of cool stuff. It seemed like the start of the golden years where we continued to get a lot of cool APIs each release.
I began in 1998 with a HTML site I created to show my artist work. I found it was a pain to update (all these internal links to modify for each entry) so I searched for a selfhosted solution and adopted Dotclear. It was a clean and fast program but I read so much things about WordPress I decided to take a look. I was not very impressed -much heavier than Dotclear – but it managed thumbnails and featured posts and so much shiny themes. As my site was about comics and illustrations, WP won the battle. I’m quite bored with the evolution of WP but all the sites I manage are under WP, I created some WooCommerce shops and even began to play with Gutenberg as page builder. So I suppose there is no chance I quit WP in the next future.
I’ve managed a portfolio of static websites for a small company. As the company business has grown, the demands for publishing platform grew too. The company hold for the static website model because of page speed and SEO considerations. However, WordPress combined with CDN and fast database infrastructure offered a good compromise of powerful publishing platform with a reasonable page speed. Once we switched to WordPress nobody wanted ever again to deal with a mess of static website platforms. As a publishing platform WordPress is unbeatable in flexibility, easy learning, design and publishing capabilities, user management, etc. Switch to block editor was also epiphany of customising sites on a fly.
I had background from creating B2B database driven web applications in 1999.
I started trying out some simple blogging scripts 2002-2004, changed them to my needs and preference – until I discovered both Moveable Type and WordPress. As WordPress was so easy to install on the only server I had full access to then, a Windows Server, once I got MySQL and PHP working on it.
The fun part started when I started to extend and modify themes, and got engaged in community driven blog with a lot of users.
With custom plugins I could even change admin and create completely new functionality. Completely hooked.
Went to my first WordCamp in San Francisco 2011 and was overwhelmed with the community and the spirit, with people from all over the globe.
Created blogs for friends and friends of friends, for free. Then for non profits, ok paid, and then for some businesses, better paid. Made a work hours logging system for a health care company, and it still pays off monthly.
Started small code contributing, learning, more learning, and contribute translations to Norwegian.
I started with Blogger back in about 2005, then moved on to TypePad. When I wanted to go the self-hosted route I looked at Expression Engine then Movable Type and had just about settled on MT when the great “shot in the foot” happened so WordPress it was! I still have “WordPress 3.0 for Dummies” in my office as a memento.
I do miss those days, when “social media” was chat services, and bloggers sharing and commenting on each others’ blogs. It was simpler, the rules were clearer. I might also just be a bit nostalgic for it. I really believe that social media, in it’s current form, has ruined the internet, but it was inevitable I suppose.
I mostly just like that you have a blogroll in your sidebar. I always find that folks who have those tend to share the most interesting blogs/sites.
Okay, I just have to bite at this one.
I owned and ran a marketing/design company for 17 years (starting in 1993) before my deep dive into WordPress. I spent several years creating hideous HTML sites for clients and dreaded every moment as I came from the world of print. So by 2007 I was desperate for a better and easier solution.
Having had a growing interest in blogging since 2005, when I hit that pinnacle, it was WordPress that I landed on. At the same time I realized that I could create decent looking sites for clients without knowing code. Sweet. That led to creating the BobWP brand in 2010 and as they say, the rest is history.
I started using WordPress in 2010. First, it was just for fun. Started writing blogs and earn good money in Adsense. Now I am designing websites for clients.
It has everything and is easy to use.
We built a bespoke CMS which we used for all our clients, but versioning was hell. Any time we’d fix a bug on our latest version we’d have to revisit all the clients on lower versions and manually add the fixes. Around 2007 / 2008 we realised that using WP as a framework meant we could extend it with whatever we needed and the update of core would take care of a lot of our donkey work. Add to that there were lots of handy functions and docs for the tasks we’d often perform, sanitisation, user-meta, uploads, etc.
I regret to use WordPress from 10 years ago. I like bbpress forum but it is purchased by WordPress. And I have been looking for a stable cms system and wanna to use WordPress to be the role. But in 10 years, it changes a lot but still a personal blog system. Many may say there are a lot of plugins but Gutenberg is another way to personal website not for a business website. I regret to use WordPress. If 10 years ago, I would use another cms system, now I would have a business websites just by myself. but it is regret that still need theme development and many things. Gutenberg? I often ask myself: I am good at MS word and why to use Gutenberg? I choose WordPress just for another MS word editor? I need a business website not a page of Gutenberg like word editor works.
Just noting that WordPress did not purchase bbPress. Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, built the original bbPress software. Eventually, he decided to transition it to a WordPress plugin instead of maintaining it as independent software.
It was purely a business decision. I had more and more clients ask for it so I decided to use it. It’s been a number of years now and WordPress work is all I do anymore. I enjoy it.
I started using WordPress in February 2005. The Blog I created ist still existing, the old “Default” Theme exists still in the Themes Folder. With one Excption, all Updates worked fine and thats absolutely amazing! Thank you, WordPress. I started blogging because I wanted a solution to quickly publish texts and images. Before WordPress, i used vi to create HTML Files, but not JPEG 🙂 In my oppinion, WordPress is a fantastic Success Story. Thanks again.
I started 2007 with a small blog. It only got interesting when I found a new plugin called Members by a guy called Justin Tadlock. I used it daily to communicate with my team of remote workers. Our own little intranet. That grew to include other teams.
My office, a part of the UK Government, was not pleased, but being slightly obstinate I would not take it down without good reason. Eventually, the office decided to roll it out nationally. Sadly they changed the CMS.
I think I’ve heard of that guy. 🙂
When I was learning web development, we didn’t really get into specific CMS platforms in class. I interned at an agency that had a few Joomla sites and some WordPress sites and that was my first exposure of it. Just ran with WordPress from there.
I started my blogging experience with Blogger, but soon realised that the site looked like anybody else’s site. I found WordPress by accident after seeing another blog that had “Powered by WordPress” in the footer. Did a bit of research and discovered that I could get a bit creative with WordPress. I used the free version for a couple of years, bore getting my own domain name and upgraded to a Personal Plan, which suited my purpose better.
. . . because FrontPage was finally dead (for static, non-blogging, infomercial sites)
I will never understand why MS did that, as their tool wasn’t bad, especially if you knew HTML and Javascript . . . and folks were starting to build add-ons for it
Great story – awesome answers and discussion – it is a great pleasure to see this here.
I started in 2012 after using PHPNuke, PostNuke (untill 2004) and then Joomla for a long time.
i love the global wordpress community – it is so awesome.
To be honest, it all started for me with getting a position as a copywriter. Because the topics I wrote about were actually part of my hobby (esports) I was able to roll out a good writing piece every one or two days. The content was pouring in so quickly I was asked if I would like to be the one responsible for the entire blog section of a website. The rest is history.
I started with perl and cgi. Got lazy and did some movable type when it came out. Was sorry to see how that ended. I saw today where a gutenberg template got compromised. I was waiting for that. All in all great tool though I miss my old Indy and Sparc.
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