WordPress News Roundup April 2003: WordPress Gets Its Name, a SourceForge Branch and Its First Commits

April 2003 was when WordPress went from an idea to a project. On April 1, Matt Mullenweg created a new branch of b2 in the cafelog project on SourceForge and called it WordPress. The name came from his friend Christine Selleck Tremoulet. The first commits went into the repository the same day, and within a week the project had a development blog running on its own software.

By the end of the month, Mike Little had made his first contributions, and the team had set out what the first release would include.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No deals involved WordPress. Elsewhere in blogging, Six Apart, maker of Movable Type, took its first outside investment in April from Joi Ito’s Japanese firm Neoteny. The amount was not disclosed. The money would help fund Six Apart’s move into hosted blogging later in the year.

WordPress Core Updates

• First commits (April 1–7): Mullenweg’s earliest changes were about markup, not features. He made semantic fixes, converted presentational markup to proper headings, and restructured the default template toward XHTML 1.1 compliance while keeping an XHTML 1.0 doctype.
• Development blog opens (April 6): A welcome post introduced the WordPress development blog. It ran on WordPress itself and worked as a changelog with comments. A day later, comment notification emails were cleaned up so blog owners could reply privately to commenters.
• The .7 plan (April 9): The first release was outlined as groundwork for later features. A beta would go out about a week before release to people on the announcement list.
• The template engine debate: Over several posts from April 15 to 23, Mullenweg compared about 35 PHP templating systems, including Smarty, SmartTemplate and patTemplate. He leaned toward Smarty. WordPress never adopted a template engine, and plain PHP templates became one of its defining traits.
• A setback: A computer problem erased a couple of days of work in mid-April, and Mullenweg promised to commit to CVS more often.
• Mike Little’s first commits: On April 21, Little filled in files missing from the new branch. On April 24 he added excerpt support, his first feature for WordPress.
• Texturize arrives (April 23): Mullenweg checked in wptexturize, his typography filter, along with the first WordPress branding in the code.

Other WordPress News

• First publicity: Mullenweg thanked Christine for linking to the project from Scriptygoddess and Big Pink Cookie. He noted that she used Movable Type herself but had supported WordPress from the start.
• Standards first: The new site’s validation errors were fixed within days of launch, a small sign of how much the team cared about clean markup.

Industry Trends and Insights

With Blogger now owned by Google and Six Apart taking venture money, commercial blogging platforms were attracting investors. WordPress started from the opposite end: a volunteer branch of an abandoned GPL project, built by a student and a handful of b2 regulars, with standards-compliant output as its first selling point.

Host of the Month: SourceForge

WordPress’s first home was the cafelog project on SourceForge, the free hosting service for open-source projects. It provided the CVS repository where the first commits landed and, later, the download mirrors for early releases. For a project with no budget, that free infrastructure mattered.

Founder of the Month: Christine Selleck Tremoulet

Christine Selleck Tremoulet, a friend of Mullenweg’s, came up with the name “WordPress.” She also sent the project some of its first traffic from her blogs, even though she was a Movable Type user. Few naming decisions in open source have lasted as well.

Looking Ahead to May 2003

The team’s goal was the first public release, numbered .7, which picked up where b2’s last 0.6 releases left off. A beta was promised to mailing-list subscribers about a week before launch. Little’s excerpts still needed debugging before they could ship.