The new homepage brings more attention to the benefits and experience of using WordPress, while also highlighting the community and resources to get started. 

The new download page greets visitors with a new layout that makes getting started with WordPress even easier by presenting both the download and hosting options right at the top.

This redesign was made possible through great collaboration between Design, Marketing, and Meta teams. Thank you to everyone involved throughout this update:

@abuzon @adamwood @adeebmalik @alexandreb3 @alipawp @angelasjin @aniash_29 @annezazu @beafialho @bjmcsherry @chanthaboune @colinchadwick @crevilaro @critterverse @dansoschin @dd32 @dufresnesteven @eboxnet @eidolonnight @elmastudio @fernandot @geoffgraham @iandunn @javiarce @joedolson @jpantani @kellychoffman @laurlittle @marybaum @matt @maurodf @melchoyce @mikachan @nikhilgandal @pablohoneyhoney @peakzebra @poliuk @priethor @psmits1567 @renyot @rmartinezduque @ryelle @santanainniss @sereedmedia @sippis @tellyworth @tobifjellner @webdados @willmot

Your comments, including some feedback from the 2016 redesign, were taken into consideration with this work. Expect more updates to come as efforts to jazz up WordPress.org continue.

In June 2021, @beafialho in collaboration with @pablohoney floated the idea of giving WordPress News a new look. Today, those ideas become a reality—we’re excited to share that redesign of WordPress News is live!

The new design leans on the aesthetics of jazz, intrinsically connected to WordPress and which ultimately translates its uniqueness, historic significance and future potential. Among other improvements, the new design leaves more space for content and includes new typefaces for better readability. It also uses a color palette intended to reflect the evolving Gutenberg language.

The revamp of the WordPress News page includes the header and footer of the page. We also shipped those two global elements to all pages of WordPress.org. However, there’s more work to do within the header to improve the information architecture. This new design is just the first, small step to modernize and improve the site iteratively. Any further discussion on future redesigns will occur in the #design channel on Slack.

Take a look around and subscribe to WordPress News if you haven’t already. If you see something in the design that doesn’t look right, please submit an issue on GitHub.

Since our last birthday we developed our 40th release and now also support over 40% of the web. So it seems fitting that this year’s celebration should be a list of 40 milestones that have helped us get there.

Grab a slice of cake or festive beverage and give it a scroll!

New Theme and Plugin Directories

Since WordPress 3.8, you’ve been enjoying improved theme management in your WordPress admin, and in WordPress 4.0 plugin management was refined. We’ve brought these experiences from your admin and re-created them right here on WordPress.org.

Theme Directory

The Theme Directory has a better browsing experience, with handy tabs where you can view featured, popular, and the latest themes. As with the theme experience in your admin, you can use the feature filter to browse for just the right theme for your WordPress website.

Click on a theme to get more information about it, including shiny screenshots, ratings, and statistics.

Konstantin Obenland posted a good overview of everything involved with the theme directory overhaul and followed up with a post on improved statistics.

Plugin Directory

The Plugin Directory has a brand new theme that mirrors the experience in your WordPress admin, with a more visual experience, and better search and statistics.

As well as a facelift, there are some great new features for you to play around with:

• Favorites – when you’re logged in to you WordPress.org account, this page gives you direct access to the plugins that you have favorited.
• Beta Testing – try out plugins where developers are experimenting with new features for WordPress.
• Search by plugin author – you can search for a plugin author using their username.
• Better statistics – listings now display the number of active installs so you can see how many people are actually using a plugin.

An overview of the new theme was posted by Scott Reilly.

Better Statistics

We’ve made huge improvements to our statistics. This gives us more useful information about the WordPress versions people are using, their PHP version, and their MySQL version.

Already these new statistics have provided us with useful insights into WordPress usage.

• More than 43% of all sites are running the latest version of WordPress. Previously, we thought only 10% of sites were up-to-date. By excluding sites that are no longer online we were able to improve these statistics.
• We were able to clear up the data around WordPress 3.0, bringing it more in line with expectations. This anomaly was a by-product of spammers.
• Only 15.9% of sites are using PHP 5.2, which is better than we thought.

Over the coming months we’ll be able to use these statistics to bring you new tools and improvements, and to make more informed decisions across the board. Read Andrew Nacin’s post about these changes for more background.

Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the theme directory redesign, the plugin directory refresh, and improved statistics: Alin Marcu, Damon Cook, Dion Hulse, Dominik Schilling, Jan Cavan Boulas, Konstantin Obenland, Kyle Maurer, Matías Ventura, Mel Choyce, Natalie MacLees, Paul de Wouters, Samuel Sidler, Samuel Wood (Otto), Scott Reilly, Siobhan McKeown.

If you want to help out or follow along with future WordPress.org projects, check out Make WordPress and our meta development blog.

At ten years, it’s fun to reflect on our beginnings. We launched WordPress on 27th May 2003, but that wasn’t inception. Go back far enough, and you can read a post by Michel Valdrighi who, frustrated by the self-hosted blogging platforms available, decided to write his own software; “b2, a PHP+MySQL alternative to Blogger and GreyMatter.” b2 was easy to install, easy to configure, and easy for developers to extend. Of all the blogging platforms out there, b2 was the right one for me: I could write my content and get it on the web quickly and painlessly.

Sometimes, however, life gets in the way. In 2002, Michel stopped maintaining b2. Over time, security flaws became apparent and updates were needed and, while the b2 community could write patches and fixes, no one was driving the software forward. We were lucky that Michel decided to release b2 under the GPL; the software may have been abandoned, but we weren’t without options. A fork was always a possibility. That was where it stood in January 2003, when I posted about forking b2 and Mike responded. The rest, as they say, is history.

From the very beginning to the present day, I’ve been impressed by the thought, care, and dedication that WordPress’ developers have demonstrated. Each one has brought his or her unique perspective, each individual has strengthened the whole. It would be impossible to thank each of them here individually, but their achievements speak for themselves. In WordPress 1.2 the new Plugin API made it easy for developers to extend WordPress. In the same release gettext() internationalization opened WordPress up to every language (hat tip: Ryan Boren for spending hours wrapping strings with gettext). In WordPress 1.5 our Theme system made it possible for WordPress users to quickly change their site’s design: there was huge resistance to the theme system from the wider community at the time, but can you imagine WordPress without it? Versions 2.7, 2.8, and 2.9 saw improvements that let users install and update their plugins and themes with one click. WordPress has seen a redesign by happycog (2.3) and gone under extensive user testing and redesign (Crazyhorse, Liz Danzico and Jen Mylo, WordPress 2.5). In WordPress 3.0 we merged WordPress MU with WordPress — a huge job but 100% worth it. And in WordPress 3.5 we revamped the media uploader to make it easier for people to get their images, video, and media online.

In sticking to our commitment to user experience, we’ve done a few things that have made us unpopular. The WYSIWYG editor was hated by many, especially those who felt that if you have a blog you should know HTML. Some developers hated that we stuck with our code, refusing to rewrite, but it’s always been the users that matter: better a developer lose sleep than a site break for a user. Our code isn’t always beautiful, after all, when WordPress was created most of us were still learning PHP, but we try to make a flawless experience for users.

It’s not all about developers. WordPress’ strength lies in the diversity of its community. From the start, we wanted a low barrier to entry and we came up with our “famous 5 minute install”. This brought on board users from varied technical background: people who didn’t write code wanted to help make WordPress better. If you couldn’t write code, it didn’t matter: you could answer a question in the support forums, write documentation, translate WordPress, or build your friends and family a WordPress website. There is space in the community for anyone with a passion for WordPress.

It’s been wonderful to see all of the people who have used WordPress to build their home on the internet. Early on we got excited by switchers. From a community of tinkerers we grew, as writers such as Om Malik, Mark Pilgrim, and Molly Holzschlag made the switch to WordPress. Our commitment to effortless publishing quickly paid off and has continued to do so: the WordPress 1.2 release saw 822 downloads per day, our latest release, WordPress 3.5, has seen 145,692 per day.

I’m continually amazed by what people have built with WordPress. I’ve seen musicians and photographers, magazines such as Life, BoingBoing, and the New York Observer, government websites, a filesystem, mobile applications, and even seen WordPress guide missiles.

As the web evolves, WordPress evolves. Factors outside of our control will always influence WordPress’ development: today it’s mobile devices and retina display, tomorrow it could be Google Glass or technology not yet conceived. A lot can happen in ten years! As technology changes and advances, WordPress has to change with it while remaining true to its core values: making publishing online easy for everyone. How we rise to these challenges will be what defines WordPress over the coming ten years.

To celebrate ten years of WordPress, we’re working on a book about our history. We’re carrying out interviews with people who have involved with the community from the very beginning, those who are still around, and those who have left. It’s a huge project, but we wanted to have something to share with you on the 10th anniversary. To learn about the very early days of WordPress, just after Mike and I forked b2 you can download Chapter 3 right here. We’ll be releasing the rest of the book serially, so watch out as the story of the last ten years emerges.

In the meantime, I penned my own letter to WordPress and other community members have been sharing their thoughts:

• Mike Little on our Ten Year Journey.
• Core contributor Helen Hou-Sandi wishes WordPress happy birthday.
• Peter Westwood on a decade gone.
• Support rep Mika Epstein on her WordPress journey.
• Dougal Campbell celebrating with his wife, Suze.
• Otto on how WordPress affected him.

You can see how WordPress’ 10th Anniversary was celebrated all over the world by visiting the wp10 website, according to Meetup we had 4,999 celebrators.

To finish, I just want to say thank you to everyone: to the developers who write the code, to the designers who make WordPress sing, to the worldwide community translating WordPress into so many languages, to volunteers who answer support questions, to those who make WordPress accessible, to the systems team and the plugin and theme reviewers, to documentation writers, event organisers, evangelists, detractors, supporters and friends. Thanks to the jazzers whose music inspired us and whose names are at the heart of WordPress. Thanks to everyone who uses WordPress to power their blog or website, and to everyone who will in the future. Thanks to WordPress and its community that I’m proud to be part of.

Thank you. I can’t wait to see what the next ten years bring.

Final thanks to Siobhan McKeown for help with this post.

Our first focus was around improving the discussion and support around plugins.

You’ll now notice that threads about a plugin are pulled directly into a “support” tab on the plugin page — each plugin has its own forum. We’ve made authors much more prominent and with bigger Gravatars and better placement, so you can get a sense of who made the plugin you’re using. And finally to show how active and well-supported a plugin is, you can see  “16 of 75 support threads in the last two weeks have been resolved.” Finally, if you’re logged in you get access to the new “favorites” feature that lets you mark the plugins you use the most so you can share them on your profile page and find them quickly later. We soft-launched favorites a few days ago and there have already been 2,000 saved!

If you’re a plugin author, we’ve started with a short threshold (2 weeks) for the resolved stats so it’s easy to catch up and stay on top of it. (It’ll eventually go to two months.) You also now have the ability to set stickies on your plugin forum to put FAQs or important information at the top, and of course any person you put as a committer on the plugin will have moderation access. People on the forum tag will see your custom header and links to the other resources attached to your plugin.

We’ve tightened up the styling a bit on the forums and plugin pages, though still some cleanups to do there. Some older improvements you might have missed, but are still useful for users and developers alike:

• “Plugin headers” or those cool graphics you see at the top of plugin pages have really taken off, there are over 1,600 active now.
• You can now subscribe to get an email whenever a commit is made to a plugin repository even if it isn’t yours. There is no better way to follow the development of your favorite plugins. There’s nothing like the smell of fresh changesets in the morning.
• Behind the scenes, we’ve dramatically ramped up proactive scanning of the entire repository to help authors fix security and other problems they might not even know about yet. The quality level of the repo has gone way, way up.

All of this will continue to evolve as we get feedback and see usage, but we’re happy to have been able to make some key improvements in just a few days while hanging out in Memphis. (This is why WordCamps usually have BBQ — it imparts magical coding powers.)

We also conducted our first ever user and developer survey, which got over 18,000 responses from all over the world:

We found a few interesting tidbits from the survey responses already, including that 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50. In tough economic times, it’s heartening to see Open Source creating so many jobs. (If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate.)

I talk about this data, and much more, in my State of the Word address which you can watch here:

We know there’s more good stuff hidden in there and we’re open sourcing and releasing the raw information behind it. If you’re a researcher and would like to dig into the anonymized survey data yourself, you can grab it here. (Careful, it’s a 9MB CSV.)

There has never been a better time to be part of the WordPress community, and I want to thank each and every one of you for making it such a wonderful place to be. Now it’s time to get back to work, there’s still 85.3% of the web that needs help.

The growth over the past year has blown me away. Since our last birthday we’ve doubled theme downloads to over 10 million, and doubled plugin downloads to 60 million. Most importantly, we continued to grow the development community to 1,528 people active on Trac and 13 committers, both numbers the highest in the history of WordPress.

That’s 1,528 people pouring their hearts and souls into GPL software we all own, we all build on, we can use as we please, we can all make better. We’ve evolved from a simple script to a web platform.

We’re on the cusp of version 3.0, with a release candidate coming out any minute now.

If you’d like to celebrate WordPress’s birthday with us — tell a friend! Help them upgrade their blog or find the perfect theme. Talk about how WordPress is built by and for a community. Drop in to help test 3.0, including all the plugins you use. Write something to take advantage of the new 3.0 features, or teach your friends how to. If you buy any themes or plugins, make sure they’re GPL or compatible just like WordPress. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, it’s important that we not forget that Open Source got us this far, and is the only way we’re going to get to the next level. The whole of what we can build together is far greater than the sum of our parts. Spread the good word.

Matt,

You asked the Software Freedom Law Center to clarify the status of themes as derivative works of WordPress, a content management software package written in PHP and licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

We examined release candidate 1 of WordPress 2.8, which you provided to us at https://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8-RC1.tar.gz. The “classic” and “default” themes included in that release candidate comprise various PHP and CSS files along with an optional directory of images. The PHP files contain a mix of HTML markup and PHP calls to
WordPress functions. There is some programmatic logic in the PHP code, including loops and conditionals.

When WordPress is started, it executes various routines that prepare information for use by themes. In normal use, control is then transferred via PHP’s include() function to HTML and PHP templates found in theme package files. The PHP code in those template files relies on the earlier-prepared information to fill the templates for serving to the client.

On the basis of that version of WordPress, and considering those themes as if they had been added to WordPress by a third party, it is our opinion that the themes presented, and any that are substantially similar, contain elements that are derivative works of the WordPress software as well as elements that are potentially separate works. Specifically, the CSS files and material contained in the images directory of the “default” theme are works separate from the WordPress code. On the other hand, the PHP and HTML code that is intermingled with and operated on by PHP the code derives from the WordPress code.

In the WordPress themes, CSS files and images exist purely as data to be served by a web server. WordPress itself ignores these files[1]. The CSS and image files are simply read by the server as data and delivered verbatim to the user, avoiding the WordPress instance altogether. The CSS and images could easily be used with a range of HTML documents and read and displayed by a variety of software having no relation to WordPress. As such, these files are separate works from the WordPress code itself.

The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work.

HTML elements are intermingled with PHP in the two themes presented. These snippets of HTML interspersed with PHP throughout the theme PHP files together form a work whose form is highly dependent on the PHP and thus derivative of it.

In conclusion, the WordPress themes supplied contain elements that are derivative of WordPress’s copyrighted code. These themes, being collections of distinct works (images, CSS files, PHP files), need not be GPL-licensed as a whole. Rather, the PHP files are subject to the requirements of the GPL while the images and CSS are not. Third-party developers of such themes may apply restrictive copyrights to these elements if they wish.

Finally, we note that it might be possible to design a valid WordPress theme that avoids the factors that subject it to WordPress’s copyright, but such a theme would have to forgo almost all the WordPress functionality that makes the software useful.

Sincerely,
James Vasile
Software Freedom Law Center

[1] There is one exception. WordPress does reads CSS and image files to create previews of templates for the template selection portion of the administrative interface. Even in that case, though, nothing in those files calls any WordPress functions, is treated as a command by PHP, or alters any other WordPress data structure. These files are read as data and used to create an image and display a miniaturized version of a webpage to the user.

Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or javascript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.