The WordPress Time Machine

WordPress is now the world’s most popular content management system – with millions of users around the world, a whole community of contributors and over 40,000 plugins that have been downloaded over 1 billion times. WordPress’ rise from being a simple blogging tool to powering large, complex websites has been impressive to say the least.

We started talking about version 1.0 of WordPress one day here in the 93digital office and that’s when I had the concept for the time machine. Many current WordPress users, including us, take lots of WordPress features for granted, forgetting that back in 2004 it was just a simple blog publishing tool. I loved the idea of being able to create an archive of all previous versions of WordPress – a visual reminder of just how far it has come.

With the idea created, we set about designing the portal before our WordPress developer Alessandro tirelessly went through the archive of every major version of WordPress since 1.0 (25 versions in total) and set them up one by one so we could capture a screenshot of the Dashboard and the default WordPress theme at the time. Getting version 1.0 running smoothly enough to capture screenshots was a challenge, but we got there eventually!

With the designs completed and screenshots ready to go, we built the WordPress Time Machine into an interactive portal with scrollable timeline, showcasing every major version of WordPress since it was created.

Check out the History of WordPress – we hope you find it interesting!