A love letter to WordPress

Celebrating 10 years.

Dear WordPress,

It seems like only yesterday but it was 10 years ago we started this crazy thing together.

There was Blogger which was free but was held together with sellotape and string. Moveable Type was overly technical and you had to pay, and well, LiveJournal was just plain crazy.

You were new, exciting and held the promise of free, easy web publishing. Sure you were a bit plain at first, a little geeky, but what promise. We started something special together.

The tough times

Soon you were everywhere. All WordPress sites looked the same, that same theme. All blue gradient fills and Tahoma. Sure there were themes but they all looked the same. It was hard to make you look pretty.

You slowed down, performance suffered.

That time you got hacked and embarrassingly, Google emailed me and let me know! I felt betrayed. All that early promise. Then the spam problem, oh my the spam problem. But I stuck with you. Many of my friends didn’t, they moved on to the newest, prettiest thing.

Our relationship suffered, I had a fling with Typepad but I came back to you.

But then you wised up. Askimet for spam, toughening up, not so naive, so trusting of the internet. Asking friends to make plugins to protect you. The abundance of themes meant you always had a new look. You sped up, lost that bloat.

Our future together

I need you to do something, you are there. You adapt and in advance, think of my needs through the plethora of plugins. You play nicely with pretty much any service or API out there. Instagram, no problem, Twitter, easy, MailChimp, Buffer, the list continues. Through IFTTT.com anything is possible. You opened my eyes to the possibilities of the IndieWeb.

Sure there are faster, leaner, cooler tools but you are quick enough, stable enough, happy and easy to use. You aren’t fancy and fly by night like easyCome.js or easyGo.io. You with your desperately uncool but ubiquitous and simple PHP, you can be installed anywhere for pennies. You aren’t complex, powerful or lean, you are simple and easy to understand.

WordPress, you’ve always been there for me and I’m looking forward to our life together.

Don’t go changing.

Yours with affection,

Joe (mr)

From a conversation with Brad Frost and Amber Case on a wet Oslo evening on how we all love WordPress and struggle to understand why it has such a bad rep.

Inspired by Matt Mullenweg’s love-letter last year to WordPress.

Previously published on the much missed Pastry Box.