Iterative Wonders, a tech and AI publicaton penned last week how simple, yet how impactful an idea can be.
In this case, the launch of WordPress, which today powers 43% of all websites worldwide amd among websites that use a content-management system (CMS) holds about 64% market share.
“The moment of conception for WordPress happened not in a boardroom, but in a rather polite (and now legendary) blog post. Matt Mullenweg simply wrote:
“My logging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay.
What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?”
— Matt Mullenweg, The Blogging Software Dilemma (2003)
The very next day, from Stockport in the UK, a developer named Mike Little left a reply on that post:
“Matt,
If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. Perhaps a post to the B2 forum, suggesting a fork would be a good starting point.”
— Mike Little
That’s it. No pitch deck. No roadmap. Just one polite blog post from a frustrated blogger and one thoughtful comment from a stranger an ocean away.”.
Like many early online publishers, LexBlog began on Movable Type in 2003 before shifting to WordPress so we could scale and serve a growing community of legal publishers.
And for that, I and many others owe a genuine thanks to Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little — the co-founders of WordPress whose work made modern publishing possible.
What they built now supports an ecosystem where WordPress users publish 70 million posts each month, where sites on the platform generate 20 billion page views and reach more than 409 million people monthly, and where a substantial share of the world’s highest-traffic sites run on WordPress.
Their contribution helped create the foundation on which legal publishing could grow, and where communities of publishers like LexBlog’s could take root and thrive.