Twenty-three years ago, a team of 2 friends released something into the world that they probably couldn’t have fully imagined the consequences of. Not just a publishing tool, though it became that for hundreds of millions of people but a reason to find each other.
WordPress just turned 23. And if you’re not yet part of this community, I want to tell you what you’re missing. It starts, usually, with a problem you need to solve. A website. A blog. A business that needs a home on the internet. You find WordPress, and it works, and you move on with your life. That’s how most stories begin here.
But then something else happens.
You find a forum thread where someone spent three hours helping a stranger debug a plugin for free. You find a WordCamp in your city and you show up mostly for the tote bag and the discount codes. You end up in a conversation over coffee with someone who has been building on WordPress since 2007, and they treat your questions like they’re worth answering. Because to them, they are.
That’s when the story changes.
WordCamps are where this community becomes visible in a way that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t been. The person who wrote the code that quietly runs your website is sitting two seats away from someone who published their very first post this morning. A developer who has contributed thousands of hours to core is sharing a lunch table with a grandmother in Uganda who just launched her first online store.
No hierarchy. No velvet ropes. Just people who showed up.
You stay because someone grabs your arm at the end of a session and says, your plugin changed my business, and they mean it in a way that lands somewhere deep. You stay because the late nights and the loud rooms and the occasional quiet moment in a hallway conversation turn into something you didn’t expect: friendship. Partnership. For some of us, something that feels a lot like family.
This is what open source looks like when it actually works.
Not obligation. Not corporate mandate. Gratitude. People giving back because something was given to them first, freely, without condition, by people they may never meet. The whole thing runs on a kind of trust that shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet here we are. Twenty-three years in. Still going.
On this birthday, I want to name some of the people and organizations who make this community what it is, who show up, contribute, advocate, and remind the rest of us why we’re here.
People wishing WordPress a happy birthday:
@thehopemonger, @stephendumba1, @noelinenandago, @adityakane, @ssebuwufumoses, @kiviiri, @unintended8 among others
And the companies whose work brings so many of us to WordPress in the first place:
Jetpack, WordPress.com, Woo, Hostinger, Bluehost, WooCommerce, Akismet, Gravatar, Automattic, Forth Focus, miniOrange, Elementor, Green Geeks among others
This list is not complete. It never could be.
The next WordCamp is coming. The late nights and the loud rooms and the quiet hallway moments are all waiting for you.
Don’t miss it.
Happy Birthday, WordPress. Let’s keep going—together.
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