Fifteen years ago, Matt Mullenweg, founder of California-based Automattic, a company established to "make the Web a better place", announced the availability of WordPress, a free and open source content management system.
In the media release, dated 27 May 2003, Mullenweg stated that the system contained a texturise feature "so good, it'll make your quotes curl" and a link manager that would enable users to "manage as many blogrolls as you like, and have complete control over their display".
Today, this open source project powers 30% of all Web sites, when measuring usage and market share. That's 10 times more than its closest rival, Joomla, according to W3Techs (World Wide Web Technology Surveys).
WordPress is gearing up to celebrate its 15th anniversary by hosting parties all over the world to mark the occasion.
In South Africa, parties have been arranged in Cape Town, on 24 May, and Johannesburg, on 26 May.
Further north, parties are being organised in Harare, Zimbabwe, as well as in Kenya (Nairobi and Mombasa), Cameroon, several in Nigeria and one in Liberia.
Streaks ahead
The 30% market share figure relates to the entire Web, regardless of whether the sites use a content management system (CMS) that is monitored by W3Tech, or are among the just-over-half of all Web sites that don't use a CMS at all.
However, if only Web sites using identified CMSes are taken into account, WordPress claims a whopping 62.2% market share, up from 58.7% in 2015.
Compare this with Joomla, which claims only 3.1% usage and a market share of 6.3% of the CMS-using Web sites. Then comes Drupal (2.2% usage and 4.4% market share); Magento (1.2% usage and 2.4% market share); and Shopify (1% usage and 1.9% market share).
A question that is often asked is why WordPress has grown to dominate the market.
The consensus among developers and commentators appears to be that WordPress is easy to use and can be learned in a matter of minutes. It is also readily extensible and supports plug-ins that make it readily customisable.
However, it has also been shown to have security flaws, with WordPress sites subjected to hacking on a regular basis. Just this year, WordPress sites have been infected with keyloggers and impersonation malware.
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