WordPress is 10 years old today: Here’s how it’s changed the Web

You've come a long way, baby.<p>I remember when WordPress first appeared. I'd deployed the b2 blogging engine a couple of times before, and anything which made b2 easier to install/use/adapt was welcome. Amongst the (many) blog systems I'd tried up to then, b2 had the lowest technical barriers but was still an exercise in frustration to get installed and configured. In those early days of blog systems each product had its own quirks, and their own belief about what a blog was and how it should work. WordPress always tried to come across as "the Writer's" blogging system; once you had it setup to your preferences, it would stay out of the way. For the most part, anyway.<p>WordPress was never perfect, and it's still far from it, but you have to admire any system (particularly on the web) which is still going strong after 10 years, while remaining fairly close to it's original vision and principles. It made writing on the web more accessible to a generation of users, and for all its faults that should be celebrated.

"As we alluded to before, WordPress has become much more than just a blogging service, but rather a platform on which entire businesses are built on, including The Next Web, CNN, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Dow Jones, UPS, NBC Sports, TED, and many others."<p>Well... half of the linked sites ARE blogs. The others have blogs as a part of the website. But isn't it a bit much to suggest that WP is the platform on which those businesses are built?

Not to take anything away from WordPress which like many others I use on my blog but...<p>Moveabletype was the popular blogging software back in the day. It was also easy to install. About the same as wordpress. Copy the files, create a db, add the db/pass. Done.<p>Moveabletype <i>appeared</i> to be open source. It was perl so you could read the source. It was free. It was hosted on moveabletype.org, the ".org" making it appear to not be commercial. But, then once they got super popular they announced to everyone they were not open source. They wanted something like $30 for a license.<p>There was a huge backlash and it was during that time that wordpress was created and tons of people switched.<p>At least that's my understanding of the history. The point being it wasn't wordpress that made blogging easy or popular. There were several products before them including moveabletype and blogger. Had moveabletype not made their fateful decisions wordpress might never have gotten popular.

While admittedly not a fair assessment, when you compare the value that Wordpress has added to the internet ecosystem versus Tumblr, I would argue that Wordpress has had an astoundingly greater impact. There's really no fair comparison to be made between these two platforms but it's still interesting for me to think about.