WordPress News Roundup January 2004: WordPress 1.0 “Davis” Ships, Followed by 1.0.1 “Miles”

WordPress reached 1.0 in January 2004. The release came out on January 3, two days after the target date Matt Mullenweg had set at Christmas. It was named for Miles Davis, the first of WordPress’s jazz codenames. It was built to match Movable Type feature for feature, and it came with importers to help Movable Type users switch. Because the release was rushed over the holidays, a few serious bugs slipped through, and a fast follow-up, 1.0.1 “Miles”, arrived on January 25.

The month also showed a growing community. Nightly builds started, a design competition opened, and WordPress blogs began turning up in surprising places.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 1.0 “Davis” (January 3): The release introduced search-engine-friendly permalinks using mod_rewrite, true multiple categories with clean category URLs, a much simpler installer and upgrader, comment moderation, XFN support, Atom feeds, edit links for posts and comments, trackbacks on edit, and importers for Movable Type and Textpattern.
• Nightly builds (January 6): Nightly snapshots of the development code became available. Testers were asked to include the build date when reporting bugs.
• Permalinks explained (January 8): A short guide showed how to turn on cruft-free URLs in three steps. The team admitted that copying rewrite rules into .htaccess by hand was too complicated and promised to remove that step.
• 1.0.1 Release Candidate (January 15): The RC fixed all known 1.0 issues and added speed improvements, more robust XFN support and better importers. Upgrading meant overwriting files and running upgrade.php.
• WordPress 1.0.1 “Miles” (January 25): Announced as the fastest, most stable and most secure WordPress yet.
• Code reorganisation: After 1.0.1, Mullenweg split the large template-functions file into several smaller files to make maintenance and change tracking easier.

Other WordPress News

• CSS Style Competition (January 26): WordPress sponsored a contest with prizes, run by Alex King, for new stylesheets for the default template. Entries were due by February 6.
• A first anniversary (January 28): The dev blog marked one year since Mike Little’s January 25, 2003 comment that started the project.
• A politician’s blog: Jan Marijnissen, leader of the Dutch Socialist Party, started a WordPress weblog. His first post drew 122 comments. Adam Curry, who had encouraged him, covered it too.
• Bloggies nomination: The WordPress-powered Kitta.net was nominated for Best Design in the 2004 Bloggies.
• Super Bowl rentals: With Houston hosting the Super Bowl, Mullenweg pointed to a WordPress-powered site listing local rentals that used the comment system in a creative way.

Industry Trends and Insights

Version 1.0 changed WordPress’s pitch. It was no longer just b2’s successor; it was a direct alternative to Movable Type, with comparable features, a PHP codebase that built pages dynamically instead of rebuilding static files, and a one-step importer. Few people noticed at the time, but that importer would matter enormously four months later, when Six Apart changed Movable Type’s licence.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

A year after his post about b2, Mullenweg shipped 1.0, followed it with a bug-fix release in three weeks, and kept the project visible by highlighting the people and sites using it. His willingness to admit what was still too hard, like setting up permalinks, became part of how the project talked to its users.

Looking Ahead to February 2004

The CSS Style Competition closed on February 6, with winners to follow. Development of the next major version, then planned as 1.1, had started in mid-January. The 1.0 branch was expected to get further bug fixes alongside it.