WordPress has just turned 9 years-old, which may not a diamond jubilee but is still pretty impressive. WordPress is the open-source communication management system that has helped make blogging a household activity and has had such an effect on online publishing that some of the world’s most popular sites run on it.
WordPress continues to innovate and inspire thanks to the ongoing work of Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as well as all the theme and plugin developers who make their products available for free. Thanks to them, WordPress has spawned a huge following of users, Wordheads if you will, who are helping people to use this powerful platform through seminars, webinars, videos and blogs. It’s becoming a WordPress world.
I love being part of the WordPress community even though I sometimes feel a little late to the party. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t start on working on Blogspot until 2007 and didn’t switch to WordPress until 2010. I don’t know, it just didn’t feel accessible until then. After reading the 2010 infographic to the left, I wonder if I may have been put off by version 2.9.
Two years later, I’m helping other bloggers get their WordPress on by tutoring them or hosting WordPress Workshops.
Sometimes, after a really good session, I feel like I’ve given a user the very keys to their survival and in an increasingly Internetted society, that’s not far from reality. There is no bigger sense of power as when you make technology work for you.
The next big milestone in WordPress history is version 3.4. The release candidate came out in May, so when the final bug fixes are made, the update will drop sometime this month.
Here’s what the WordPress Codex page http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.4 says are the highlights of 3.4:
Enhanced theme control
- Customize theme options before activating a new theme using Theme Customize.
- Use Theme Previewer to customize current theme without changing the front-end design.
Custom Headers
- Improved Custom Headers with flexible sizes.
- Selecting Custom Header Images and Custom Background Images from Media Library Screen.
Media improvements
HTML support has been added to image caption field.
Under the Hood improvements
- Improvements in WordPress internationalization and localization (more info).
- Different split in translation POT files for faster translations.
- Codex XML-RPC information update accessed via XML-RPC_WordPress_API.
- WP_Query improvements.
All that sounds awesome, especially the theme controls and flexible sizing for custom headers. And the ability to put hot links in image captions is something I could have used in this post.
WorldPress world of jazz
Did you know that since 2003 there have been 16 major WordPress version upgrades, roughly 2 per year, and each of these versions is named for a major jazz legend. Apparently, WordPress developers dig jazz, which makes me love them even more.
Starting with Miles Davis 1.0, there was Art Blakey 1.0.2, Charles Mingus 1.2, Billy Strayhorn 1.5, Duke Ellington 2.0, Ella Fitzgerald (my cat’s name!) 2.1, Stan Getz 2.2, Dexter Gordon 2.3, Michael Brecker 2.5, McCoy Tyner 2.6, John Coltrane 2.7, Chet Baker 2.8, Carmen McRae 2.9, Thelonius Monk (my dead cat’s name!) 3.0, Django Reinhardt 3.1, George Gershwin 3.2 and Sonny Stitt 3.3.
No news on who 3.4 will be named for, but I nominate Diana Krall – a Canadian and still living!
I’d love to hear your thoughts about the evolution of the WordPress world and how the platform has changed or improved your life.
I can safely say that WordPress has change mine.