WordPress News Roundup May 2003: WordPress 0.7 Is Released and Michel Valdrighi Names It the Official b2 Branch

May 2003 was the month WordPress shipped. After a burst of work in the third week of the month, the first release, version 0.7, was announced on May 27. A few days earlier, b2’s creator Michel Valdrighi had resurfaced to give the project his blessing. Two days after release, the team grew to three developers.

It was a small release from a small team, but it set out priorities WordPress has kept ever since: clean markup, good typography and an admin that stays out of the way.

WordPress Core Updates

• Building blocks: Matt Mullenweg added wpautop, his intelligent line-break function, on May 6. Mike Little’s excerpts were working by May 7, including automatic excerpts for old posts in the RSS and RDF feeds.
• The final push (May 21–24): The repository saw dozens of commits in a few days. They included a new admin interface, a new installer, a b2 upgrade script tested against b2 0.6.1, rough Textile support and Little’s integration of his links manager. The “So Close” update on May 22 summed up the progress.
• Betas (May 25): Two beta builds went out the same day. The second cleaned up how files were included so WordPress would run on restrictive hosts.
• WordPress 0.7 (May 27): The first release included Texturize for curly quotes and proper dashes; WordPress Links, a blogroll manager with Weblogs.com support and a bookmarklet; XHTML 1.1-compliant output (served with a 1.0 doctype by default); the new line-break function; manual excerpts; a rebuilt admin interface in valid XHTML and CSS; and new default templates. It was free under the GPL.

Other WordPress News

• The official b2 branch (May 23): Michel Valdrighi announced on cafelog.com that WordPress would become the official b2 branch once it shipped a release. The team asked for alpha testers to help get there.
• Donncha joins (May 29): Donncha Ó Caoimh, developer of the multi-user b2 fork b2++, joined the WordPress team with a plan to merge the best of both projects. That made three official developers: Mullenweg, Little and Ó Caoimh.
• Early adopters: b2 users began upgrading on release day. Alex King, who would soon be contributing code, wrote about upgrading from b2 0.6 to WordPress on May 27.

Industry Trends and Insights

The b2 forks were now openly competing. François Planque’s b2evolution published a summary of its new features in early May, and Ó Caoimh’s b2++ already powered a busy community site. Valdrighi’s endorsement made WordPress b2’s official successor. Meanwhile, Six Apart was preparing to launch TypePad, a hosted service, which showed the commercial side of blogging moving toward hosted, paid services.

Theme of the Month: WordPress 0.7 Default Template

Themes as a system were more than a year away, but 0.7 shipped new default templates built with simple, standards-based XHTML and CSS and no browser hacks. For b2 users used to messy table layouts, a clean, valid starting point was a selling point in its own right.

Plugin of the Month: WordPress Links

Mike Little’s links manager began as his own b2 add-on and was folded into WordPress for 0.7. It let bloggers run their blogroll from their own database instead of a third-party service such as Blogrolling, and it checked Weblogs.com and blo.gs for recently updated sites. The links manager stayed in WordPress for most of the next decade.

Founder of the Month: Donncha Ó Caoimh

Donncha Ó Caoimh had already built b2++, which ran blogs.linux.ie, when Mullenweg emailed him about joining forces. His agreement brought multi-user experience into the project early. That background would pay off years later, when he led WordPress MU, the multi-blog version that powered WordPress.com.

Looking Ahead to June 2003

With 0.7 out, the team began work on a follow-up. Little had an OPML importer for the links manager nearly finished, so blogrolls could be brought over from Blogrolling, and a Movable Type importer was being planned. A follow-up point release was already in the works.