Today, the global WordPress Community celebrates the 20th anniversary of the most popular CMS on the web today.
#WP20 – Happy 20th Birthday WordPress
WordPress has been a huge blessing to millions around the world, like myself, who have been able to earn income from the software and benefit from one of the most enthusiastic and loyal communities anywhere.
My first WordPress post was published around 2010. Since 2012 I’ve attended and volunteered at numerous WordCamps and local WP Meetups. In short, I try to give back as much as I can.
A Voice From The Past
Earlier in the day, I saw a video clip of Mike Little sharing some thoughts on this noteworthy milestone. Mike Little is one of the original co-founders of WordPress. I doubt that either he nor Matt Mullenweg could foresee the massive influence this little open sourced project would end up becoming, after forking the dying b2Cafe platform.
Seeing Mike onscreen after so many years, I was surprised to see how little he’s changed. (See what I did there). It reminded me of a write-up I did on Mike back in 2013, in celebration of #WP10. Unfortunately, I’d lost most of my posts from 2012-2014 when I migrated my site and misplaced the xml files on a computer, external drive, or something.
But thanks to the wayback machine, I was able to piece together the post and can now repost it here, on #WP20.
Enjoy.
WordPress Wednesday #2 – A Little on Little
originally posted on QuiteVisibleStudio.com | July 24, 2013 by Leif Quitevis
Anyone involved with WordPress will be familiar to some degree with founder Matt Mullenweg.
As Jobs was to Apple and Gates to Microsoft, Matt is the face of WordPress (and yes, Automattic – but that ruins my analogy). As we extend the Jobs/Gates parallel to their nearly-as-famous co-founders: Steve Wozniak (Apple) and Paul Allen (Microsoft), we’ll find that WordPress also has its own supporting cast in a not-quite-as-famous dude named Mike Little.
To celebrate WordPress’ 10th Anniversary, Mike recently sat down for an interview at a local pub in Manchester, near his hometown of Stockport where he resides in the UK. Aside from what I’ve read about Mike’s contribution to WordPress, it was the first time I’d heard or seen anything from or about him and found such a contrast with Matt Mullenweg.
Yet despite the contrasts I also found both to be similar in their low key personalities and understated demeanors. To demonstrate, I’ve embedded Mike’s interview below followed by Part 1 & 2 of a recent interview that Matt gave. You can draw your own conclusions.
The original Mike Little interview can be found on Vimeo here:
The Matt Mullenweg interviews can also be found on TorqueMag’s site here
Part 1
Part 2
I can’t end this post without mentioning that WordCampSF 2013 officially begins tomorrow for me, as I’ve signed-up to volunteer during Saturday’s session. There’s a volunteer orientation taking place at the Automattic Lounge tomorrow evening and I’ll be there to meet some nice people and get my marching orders. I’ve always enjoyed getting behind the scenes to see how things work – or more importantly, what happens when they don’t.
Getting thrown into the fire is probably not the most desired way to learn something new, but it certainly is effective and suits me fine. I’ll have my Kindle handy and will try to post tweets of interest.
PS… I’ll be reposting my repaired WCSF2013 recap sometime down the road.