WordPress News Roundup February 2004: Pink Lilies Wins the CSS Style Competition as Ryan Boren Makes His First Commit

February 2004 had no release, but it showed where the project was going. The CSS Style Competition closed with dozens of new stylesheets for the default template. In the code, groundwork for the next major version came from two new names and one returning one. Ryan Boren made his first commit, a contributor named jverber began optimising queries, and b2 creator Michel Valdrighi had his busiest month as a WordPress committer, moving post dates to GMT.

WordPress Core Updates

• Groundwork for 1.1: Matt Mullenweg added new database fields for the next version on February 1. Later in the month he refactored the template tags to run through filters, switched the codebase to tab indentation and replaced old global variables with calls to get_settings().
• Ryan Boren arrives (February 5): Boren’s first commit cleaned up feed and trackback URLs. By February 17 he had added author permalinks, support for PATH_INFO-style permalinks on servers without mod_rewrite, and a dedicated function for generating rewrite rules.
• GMT dates: Valdrighi rewrote the date handling and upgrade code so every post would store a GMT timestamp alongside local time. He also improved handling of encoded email subjects for post-by-email.
• Custom metadata (February 26): Dougal Campbell added support for custom data on each post. It was the first version of what would become custom fields.
• Fewer queries: jverber’s first commits cut the number of database queries used to list categories and fixed admin redirects.

Other WordPress News

• Competition closes (February 6): Alex King reminded entrants on February 3 that they had until midnight Pacific time on Friday.
• Winners announced: King named the winners on February 9: Pink Lilies by Naoko McCracken, Rubric by a designer known as ineffable, and Human Condition by Jared White. Aubergine Machine, Dark Fire, Mars Spirit and Toni received honourable mentions. The contest added 38 new styles to the collection, for 45 in total. Prize money came from community sponsors, including Mullenweg and Campbell.
• Holiday headers: Craig, a forum regular, designed a Valentine’s Day header for wordpress.org. It was one of many seasonal logos he made for the site.

Industry Trends and Insights

The competition showed that one well-structured template could support very different designs through CSS alone. That idea underpinned the standards movement and, later, WordPress themes. Underneath, the move to GMT dates and filterable template tags was less visible but just as important. It prepared WordPress for users in every time zone and for the plugin system that would let developers change output without editing core files.

Theme of the Month: Pink Lilies

Naoko McCracken’s Pink Lilies took first place in WordPress’s first design contest. Like every entry, it was just a stylesheet for the standard 1.0 template, with no changes to markup. Its win showed how much a single CSS file could change the look of a WordPress blog.

Founder of the Month: Alex King

Alex King organised and judged the CSS Style Competition, published every entry and announced the winners. It was WordPress’s first community design contest, and it helped many people begin designing for WordPress. King went on to run later design competitions, build widely used plugins and remain one of the community’s best-known developers.

Looking Ahead to March 2004

Users on 1.0.1 were waiting for more bug fixes, while the larger next version continued in nightly builds. Mullenweg was also heading to the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin in March.