Evolution of WordPress: B2/Cafelog to WordPress 1.0

by Keith Dsouza on July 14th, 2008 in WordPress

A few days ago we had told you what you should know about WordPress 2.6. The post described new features that will be introduced shortly in WordPress 2.6. Though there are several new features that you may like in this new version, there might be many that have gone unnoticed that were introduced in the earlier versions of WordPress. To quell the anticipation that users might have for the latest version, we wanted to write a series of posts that will cover WordPress from its infancy to WordPress 2.5 (the latest major version) that many of you use.

The WordPress team has been naming their major releases after popular Jazz legends and we will take a look at code names for the past releases.

B2 / Cafelog

WordPress is the official successor of B2/Cafelog which is a blogging platform created in early 2001 by Michel Valdrighi using PHP and MySQL. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little took over the development to come up with (fork?) the WordPress platform as we officially know it now in early 2003, giving birth to one of the best blogging platforms ever developed.

WordPress 0.7 – 0.71

The first version to come out under the new name was WordPress 0.7 which was released in May 2003, marking several changes over the B2/Cafelog software. WordPress 0.7 introduced several new features such as allowing users to add links to their blogrolls, new administration interfaces, manual excerpts, default templates and more.

WordPress 0.71 was just a minor revision but it brought incorporated many changes that form an integral part of WordPress as we know it today. WordPress 0.71 “Gold” introduced cool new features such as post status where users could mark the post state as draft, publish or private. A blog owner would also have greater flexibility over the comments by disabling them on a per-post basis. 0.71 also combined trackbacks, pingbacks and user written comments into a single category. There were several other changes including better administration, security fixes and more.

WordPress 0.72 added password protected posts, new xmlrpc APIs, a Blogger import and many other improvements. This version also included a new theme from Dave Shea.

WordPress 1.0

There were several minor versions in between WordPress 0.71 and WordPress 1.2 beside WordPress 1.0, which included WordPress 1.0.1 code named “Miles”. This was followed by WordPress 1.0.2 code named “Blakey” which was a smaller release based on bug fixes.

The much anticipated WordPress 1.0 was finally released on January 3rd, 2004. This version included several new exciting features (as usual). The most noticeable feature was the introduction of better search engine friendly permalinks which allowed users to structure their URLs to get better search engine visibility using mod_rewrite. The version also lifted the limitation of allowing only one category per post. This meant that users could assign several categories to a single post.

For all those who were worried about comment spam, this version included comment moderation where blog authors could moderate comments, before they would be viewable on the blog. Users could also edit pages or comments with the newly provided links. WordPress 1.0 also included support for ATOM based feeds. 1.0 was a very popular release.

There were several other new releases which we will take a look in other parts of this series. In the mean time, we would love to hear from users who had used these versions. How did the earlier versions of WordPress change your outlook towards blogging? Did those earlier versions make you a fan?

[EDIT] Fixed minor error in versions and added 0.72. Thanks Carson and Geof