WordPress started with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing on the web and fewer users than you can count on your hands and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by millions of people every day.
Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 intranet site without paying anyone a license fee.
WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.
2005 was a very exciting year for WordPress, as it saw the release of our 1.5 version which was downloaded over 900,000 times, the start of hosted service WordPress.com to expand WP's reach, the starting of Automattic by several core members of the WP team, and finally the release of version 2.0.
