WordPress History

Originally known as b2 or catalog, the progenitor to Wordpress was installed on ~2,000 blogs in may 2003, written in PHP and used with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi. When that development slowed down, Matt Mullenweg posited the idea of creating a forking path from b2 for a new CMS. With help from Mike Little, they created the first version of WordPress, 0.7, in may 27 of 2003. Within only a few years, it went from being a brand new project to the most dominant CMS on the market, and is used by 64.8% of all sites operating with a CMS today.

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is the free and open source version of WordPress. Here, you have more control over your website at the cost of needing to figure out your own hosting and more difficult technical aspects of website design. However, many people who have the skills to do so prefer this over the latter option.

WordPress.com

Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, offers a hosted option for WordPress. For those who are less technically inclined, hosting is provided by WordPress.com, making it far easier to develop a website the way you want. While greater control can only be achieved at a higher price point, this is defini