It turns out that social networks drive a heck of a lot of traffic to blogs.”Įven if other forms of web activity are encroaching on WordPress’s turf, it’s also broadening its goals. “Just because someone uses Twitter doesn’t mean they shouldn’t use WordPress, and vice versa. “You can’t do the same things on both - they’re complimentary,” he said.
I assumed that Mullenweg didn’t think that social networks had displaced blogs as a form of personal communication, but felt obligated to ask him anyhow. As Facebook and Twitter rose in popularity, for instance, it became fashionable to declare that they posed an existential threat to blogs. Increasingly, some of the things WordPress competes with don’t look anything like WordPress. It’s both, because it represents people.”
“Sometimes it looks like major media, sometimes it’s weird and ugly. “It’s more efficient to put people into a constrained box…but WordPress has always been about choice and flexibility,” said Mullenweg. WordPress alone aims to please just about anyone who wants to put any sort of content on the web. Most of these rivals have carved off a specific niche for themselves: Tumblr, for instance, flourishes as a means of quick self-expression, but nobody would attempt to use it to run a conventional news site. New blogging options have come along since, such as Tumblr and Squarespace, along with build-your-own-site services such as Wix and Weebly, and industrial-strength content-management platforms like Drupal and Joomla. There were already several well-established ways to create a blog, such as Movable Type and Blogger. With that sort of commitment to democratizing publishing - you get better at it.”īack in 2003, when WordPress was new, it was easy to identify its competition. “We plan to work on it for another decade. “We’ve been working on the same thing for a decade now,” Mullenweg said. We try to keep some of the agility of the best startups while also building things in an open-source fashion.” It’s not any one feature, but about how we do things - the community, being inclusive, always changing. I asked Mullenweg how WordPress has managed to remain relevant over a decade of radical change for the web. I know it’s an opportunity to shift the community, but it’s also like a family. “It’s about WordPress, which I know pretty well, but I still get nervous. “I’ve spoken hundreds of times now,” Mullwenweg told me. The San Francisco WordCamp is the largest, most comprehensive and influential of the bunch I ran into one developer from Brazil who’d made his first trip to the U.S. “It’s night and day, including on stage.” “Compare the percentage of women here to any other tech conference you go to,” Mullenweg said. You could tell simply by scanning the folks in the audience that the WordPress community is remarkably diverse. Over a thousand people registered for WordCamp SF, which was also streamed live on the web. I chatted with Mullenweg on Saturday at WordCamp San Francisco, the largest of the local events - 72 have been held around the world so far this year - for WordPress developers, content creators and other interested parties.
#MULLENWEG WORDPRESS WIXMULLENWEG FREE#
Today, his official title is Chief BBQ Taste Tester of Automattic, the 185-employee for-profit company that runs the free blogging service, helps corporate customers such as TIME with their WordPress-based sites and spearheads development of, the open-source, endlessly customizable version of WordPress. Mullenweg was a 19-year-old college student when he began work on the platform in 2003, originally as an offshoot of an existing open-source blogging tool he liked called B2. (Such as the site you’re reading right now.)Īccording to WordPress’s creator, Matt Mullenweg, its mission is both simple and wildly ambitious: It wants to democratize the web. But that’s an increasingly insufficient way to describe it: 18.9 percent of the web now consists of sites that run on WordPress’s software, from blogs created by newbies to big-media operations with millions of readers. Follow you glance at Wikipedia to determine what WordPress is, you might come away with the impression that it’s a tool for creating and maintaining a blog.