In short: WordPress traces back to 2003, when Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked an abandoned blogging tool called b2/cafelog and announced the first release on May 27, 2003. Open-source contribution and a plugin-and-theme architecture turned that rescued script into the content management system now running more than 43% of all websites.
Most origin stories get told as a single flash of genius. WordPress is the opposite. It began as a rescue — two people deciding an orphaned piece of software was worth saving — and everything the platform became was built on that one decision to fork rather than start over.
This page is the hub for that story. It defines where WordPress came from, names the people who started it, traces the early phases and the growth that followed, and points you toward the deeper corners of the ecosystem.
What is the origin of WordPress?
The origin of WordPress is a fork. In early 2003, a blogging tool named b2/cafelog had lost its maintainer, and a 19-year-old user named Matt Mullenweg wrote a short blog post wondering aloud whether someone might build on its code. Mike Little replied. Together they forked b2/cafelog, and the first version of WordPress was announced on May 27, 2003, per WordPress.org — our story.
That is the whole seed. No venture funding, no product plan — a GPL-licensed blog script, two contributors, and an open invitation for anyone else to help. More than two decades later the same project powers over 43% of all websites, which is roughly half of everything with a domain name.
Everything below unpacks that sentence: the software WordPress came from, the people who forked it, the phases it moved through, and why a small 2003 decision still shapes how the web publishes today.
Where did WordPress come from? The b2/cafelog fork
Before WordPress there was b2/cafelog, written by a French developer named Michel Valdrighi. It was one of the earliest tools to store posts in a MySQL database and render them with PHP on each page load — the same basic pattern WordPress still uses. b2 had a small, devoted following.
Then it went quiet. Around December 2002, Valdrighi stopped actively maintaining the project, which left existing users staring at software with no one steering it, as the History of WordPress recounts. Abandoned open-source software is a fork waiting to happen: because b2 was released under the GPL, anyone had the legal right to pick up the code and keep going.
Mullenweg and Little did exactly that, and they did not merely clone it. The early WordPress work added a cleaner administration screen and standards-compliant, XHTML 1.1 templates — real improvements over what b2 offered, documented in a WordPress history (NWTC) writeup. Valdrighi himself later joined the effort, so the lineage runs unbroken from b2/cafelog straight into WordPress.
Who are the founders of WordPress?
WordPress has two co-founders: Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Mullenweg was the b2/cafelog user whose 2003 blog post lit the match; at the time he was a teenager who would later work at CNET before turning to WordPress full-time. Little, a UK-based developer, was the one who answered that post and committed to building the fork alongside him.
There is a third name that belongs in any honest account: Michel Valdrighi. He wrote the software WordPress grew out of, and the project has always credited him as a founding developer rather than an outsider whose work got taken. The distinction matters, because it set the tone for how WordPress treats contribution.
From the start the founders framed the goal as democratizing publishing — putting a capable, free press in the hands of anyone with a web host. That phrase became the project's mission and still gets repeated at WordPress events today. It explains why the software stayed open source instead of hardening into a closed product with two owners.
What were WordPress's initial phases and growth?
The first years moved fast. WordPress 1.0 arrived in early 2004, and the version-naming tradition that honors jazz musicians began right there, as noted in this WordPress version history timeline — a small cultural signature the project has kept ever since. But the release that changed the trajectory was WordPress 1.2 in May 2004, which introduced the plugin architecture.
Plugins were the unlock. Instead of waiting for the core team to add a feature, any developer could write one and share it, and any site owner could install it in a click. Themes did the same thing for design. That plug-in-and-theme model turned WordPress from a program into a platform other people could build businesses on.
The commercial backbone came in August 2005, when Mullenweg incorporated Automattic to sustain the open-source project and launched WordPress.com, the hosted version. Akismet, the spam-filtering service, followed in 2006, and Jetpack arrived in 2011, per a Brief history of Automattic. The timeline below maps the milestones in one place.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2003 | Mullenweg and Little fork b2/cafelog; first version announced May 27 |
| 2004 | WordPress 1.0 starts the jazz-name tradition; 1.2 adds the plugin architecture |
| 2005 | Automattic incorporated in August; WordPress.com launches |
| 2006 | Akismet spam filtering released |
| 2011 | Jetpack released |
| 2018 | Gutenberg block editor ships with WordPress 5.0 |
| 2026 | WordPress 7.0 "Louis Armstrong" released May 20 |
Read top to bottom, the pattern is clear: each phase added a new way for people to contribute or build, and adoption compounded on top of the last layer.
How did WordPress grow into today's platform?
Between roughly 2007 and 2013 WordPress matured from a blog engine into a general content management system. The admin dashboard grew up, custom post types let sites model things other than blog posts, and a REST API eventually opened the door to using WordPress as a back end for apps and separate front ends.
The most disruptive shift came in 2018, when WordPress 5.0 shipped the Gutenberg block editor, replacing the classic text box with a canvas of movable content blocks, described in this Overview of the Gutenberg block editor. It was not a smooth landing. Part of the community pushed back hard over backward compatibility and plugins that broke, and the editor took several years of refinement before it settled in.
It did settle. Block-based editing expanded into full-site editing, and by 2026 Gutenberg adoption reached roughly 72%, up from 58% in 2024, according to WordPress statistics 2026.
The most recent major release, WordPress 7.0 "Louis Armstrong," shipped on May 20, 2026 and had reached about 52% of all WordPress sites by late July, according to WordPress usage statistics 2026. From a two-person fork to a version that half the WordPress web adopts in ten weeks — that is the arc.
Why the origin of WordPress still matters
The origin is not trivia. It explains the platform's defining trait: nobody can take it away. Because WordPress started as a GPL fork and stayed open source, the code belongs to everyone who uses it, which is why an entire economy of hosts, agencies, plugin shops, and theme makers could grow on top without asking permission.
That same openness is why the ecosystem keeps absorbing new capability. The plugin model that arrived in 2004 is the reason a modern site can bolt on almost anything — including newer tooling like an ai agent team for wordpress that automates content and site work the way plugins once automated features. The 2003 decision to fork rather than rebuild is still paying interest.
Use this page as your map. From here you can go deeper into where WordPress stands today, how its community and market share have shifted, and how the platform's open roots shape the tools being built on it right now — the sub-topics this hub links out to.
Key takeaways
- WordPress began in 2003 as a fork of the abandoned b2/cafelog blogging tool, with the first version announced on May 27, 2003.
- Its founders are Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, building on Michel Valdrighi's b2/cafelog lineage.
- The plugin architecture in WordPress 1.2 (2004) and the launch of Automattic and WordPress.com (2005) turned the project into a platform.
- The 2018 Gutenberg block editor reshaped how WordPress builds pages, despite early backlash; adoption reached about 72% by 2026.
- WordPress 7.0 shipped in May 2026, and the platform now powers over 43% of all websites.
FAQ
When and how did WordPress originate?
WordPress originated in 2003 as a fork of b2/cafelog, an existing open-source blogging tool. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little took over the abandoned code and announced the first version of WordPress on May 27, 2003.
Who are the founders of WordPress?
Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little co-founded WordPress. The project is built directly on b2/cafelog by Michel Valdrighi, who is credited as a founding developer and later contributed to WordPress himself.
What was WordPress based on?
It was based on b2/cafelog, a PHP-and-MySQL blogging tool whose maintainer stopped supporting it around December 2002. That abandonment, combined with b2's GPL license, is what made the fork into WordPress possible.
What were WordPress's early phases and growth milestones?
The key early steps were the plugin architecture in WordPress 1.2 (2004), the theme system, and the incorporation of Automattic with WordPress.com in 2005. Akismet (2006) and Jetpack (2011) followed, and the Gutenberg block era began in 2018.
How big is WordPress today?
WordPress powers more than 43% of all websites as of 2026. Its latest major release, WordPress 7.0, shipped in May 2026 and had reached roughly 52% of WordPress sites by late July 2026.
The open roots that started in 2003 are exactly why today's site owners can extend WordPress in nearly any direction — explore the deeper guides in this cluster to see how the platform got here and where it heads next.