Google Inside

Looking back a few years, all the way back to July 2005, Forbes.com notes Wordpress as one of their B2b “Best of the Web” favorites. They also list a “best” and “worst” for Wordpress. Let’s see what has changed in three years.

BEST: Community of users. If you have a question, either check the documentation wiki (to which anyone can contribute) or ask at the support message board. We had an obscure question answered within an hour.

WORST: Poor image management options.

Looking at Wordpress today, in February 2008, let’s take a look at what Wordpress is doing right, still.

The community.

Wordpress’ community is at the core of what makes Wordpress so successful. The hundreds and thousands of plugins developed by third-parties help make Wordpress the powerful application it is today. The amazing quick-to-respond community forum is what helps keep those new Wordpress users at bay to help them with any problems. And lastly, another key element to Wordpress’ success is their transparency and communication.

Wordpress as a whole is not much to talk about, but when you add in all of these other elements into the mix, you get one seriously powerful application.

Ginside.com uses more than 50 plugins to keep this site running. I am forever greatful to those third-party plugin developers that spend countless hours writing code — for free! Mark Jaquith, as an example, has written a ton of plugins. Fortunately for Wordpress, he works for Automattic Inc. now. Fortunately, Wordpress has volunteers like Mark to write these amazing plugins. Mark works for b5media presently.

Looking back at the “worst” of Wordpress: that has been long corrected. Image management has gotten extremely better in the past few years. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect yet, but it’s a lot better than us early Wordpress adopters knew it as.

Wordpress has come a long way. I for one, am a proud Wordpress user and evangelist.

A huge thanks to: Matt Mullenweg, Donncha O. Caoimh, Ryan Boren , just to name a few of the early developers and members involved in the Wordpress project (sorry if I left you out, I’m doing my best! But if I did leave you out, please just comment or contact me and I’ll make sure you’re added here.)

As a side note — referring to the title — I’m not saying that code is completely worthless, not at all. Code is extremely important, but I feel that Wordpress has really succeeded because of the community behind it.