WordPress News Roundup March 2003: The wordpress.org Domain Is Registered as b2 Users Wonder Where Michel Went

March 2003 was another quiet month for the b2 fork. There was no public code, no announcement and no release. Two months after Matt Mullenweg’s fork proposal, the clearest sign of progress came at the very end of the month: the domain wordpress.org was registered on March 28, according to its public registration record. The project now had a name and an address, a few days before any code went up.

WordPress Core Updates

There was nothing to release yet. The b2 codebase that WordPress would fork was still frozen at the 0.6 series, with nobody maintaining it. Public development would begin in April.

Other WordPress News

• Where is Michel? Across the b2 community, users were still wondering what had happened to b2’s creator, Michel Valdrighi. By early 2003 it was clear he would not be returning to the project any time soon.
• Other forks were already running: In Ireland, Donncha Ó Caoimh had forked b2 into b2++, a multi-user version that ran the community site blogs.linux.ie. François Planque’s b2evolution, another b2 fork, would be publishing feature summaries by May. Mullenweg’s fork was not the only one, but it would become the one that lasted.
• Web standards on ma.tt: Mullenweg kept writing about markup, publishing a college paper as both PDF and XHTML and sharing jokes hidden in page source. Standards-compliant output would become one of the new project’s first promises.

Industry Trends and Insights

The b2 situation showed both the risk and the safety net of open source. A project built around one developer could stop overnight. Because b2’s code was GPL-licensed, though, its users did not have to stop with it. Several groups were already proving that by running and extending their own copies. The open question was which fork would build a real community around it.

Founder of the Month: Michel Valdrighi

Michel Valdrighi wrote b2/cafelog, the code every one of these forks started from. His absence in early 2003 is why WordPress exists. He would return within months, first to give WordPress his blessing and later to commit code to it, which is why he is counted among the project’s founding developers.

Looking Ahead to April 2003

With a domain in hand, the next step was a public code repository and a place to talk about development. Nothing had been announced yet, but the pieces were in place for work to start in the open.