Siolon

Is WordPress “Web 2.0?”

Matt Mul­len­weg, the Word­Press lead, has the fol­low­ing to say on this question.

Some­day I think there will be a real­iza­tion that the real story is more excit­ing than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame every­thing in. It’s not just one or two guys hack­ing on some­thing alone, it’s dozens of peo­ple from across the world com­ing together because of a shared pas­sion. It’s not about sell­ing out to a sin­gle com­pany, it’s dozens of com­pa­nies inde­pen­dently adopt­ing and back­ing an open source plat­form for no rea­son other than its qual­ity. I’m not a mil­lion­aire, and may never be, but there are now hun­dreds of peo­ple mak­ing their liv­ing using Word­Press, and I expect that num­ber to grow to tens of thou­sands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morn­ing, not the prospect of becom­ing a fea­ture on an inter­net behemoth’s checklist.

Finally it’s not Web 2.0, or another band­wagon me-too con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem with AJAX, it’s a mature project that has been around and grown up over four years of hard work, and it has many, many more years of hard work ahead of it. I smile these days when I see Word­Press referred to as an “overnight suc­cess,” if only they knew how long an overnight suc­cess takes.