WordPress News Roundup January 2003: Matt Mullenweg Proposes a b2 Fork and Mike Little Offers to Help

WordPress did not exist in January 2003. There was no name, no code and no website. What existed was a problem. b2/cafelog, the PHP and MySQL blogging tool that a small but devoted community ran on their own servers, had not had an update in months, and its lead developer, Michel Valdrighi, had gone quiet. Nobody was maintaining the code or fixing its security issues.

On January 24, Matt Mullenweg, then a student in Houston who ran his blog on b2, wrote a post called “The Blogging Software Dilemma” about what to do next. A one-line reply the following day turned out to be the start of WordPress.

WordPress Core Updates

There was no WordPress code to release this month. The month’s development story was about the codebase that WordPress would later grow from.

• The fork proposal (January 24): Mullenweg explained that b2 had stalled and its developer had disappeared. He had looked at Textpattern but did not like its licence. Because b2 was released under the GPL, he proposed forking it and carrying on from the existing code. His goal was software with Movable Type’s flexibility, Textpattern’s text parsing, b2’s hackability and Blogger’s easy setup. He did not yet have a name for it.
• Mike Little replies (January 25): Mike Little, a developer in England who wrote b2 hacks, left a comment saying he would like to contribute if the fork went ahead. He suggested posting a proposal on the b2 forums as a starting point. A year later, the WordPress development blog marked that comment as the project’s real birthday.
• Better line breaks for b2: On January 29, Mullenweg released an updated version of autop, his paragraph-formatting function. It added paragraph and line-break tags without breaking block-level HTML.

Other WordPress News

• A community without a leader: b2 users kept sharing hacks and fixes on the cafelog forums, but with no maintainer, nothing new was being shipped. Other b2 users were thinking about forks too, and more than one would appear during the year.
• Tinkering in public: Mullenweg’s own blog that month showed the kind of work that would shape WordPress. He ran SQL queries to clean up old b2 posts, fixed a PHP Content-Type bug that was affecting his feeds, and wrote about referrer spam.

Industry Trends and Insights

In early 2003, blogging software split into a few camps. Movable Type was the default for serious self-hosted bloggers. Blogger was the easy hosted option. LiveJournal had its own community, and PHP tools such as b2 and Textpattern appealed to people who wanted to change the code. Mullenweg’s post noticed something that would matter a great deal later: the licence mattered as much as the features. A GPL codebase could be forked and carried on when its author moved on, and that is exactly what was about to happen.

Plugin of the Month: autop

There were no plugins yet, but autop was the kind of hack b2 users swapped. Mullenweg’s updated release this month added paragraph tags intelligently instead of putting a line break at every newline. As wpautop, it would become one of the oldest functions in WordPress and is still in core more than two decades later.

Founder of the Month: Mike Little

Mike Little’s short reply to a blog post made him WordPress’s first collaborator and, with Mullenweg, its co-founder. He was already writing b2 code. His offer to help, and his practical suggestion to start with a forum proposal, turned one person’s complaint into a two-person project.

Looking Ahead to February 2003

Nothing was on the calendar. The fork had no name, no repository and no release plan. The next steps were the ones Little had suggested: discuss the idea with the b2 community and work out what the new software should be.