WordPress Nostalgia

As we inch closer towards the 10 year anniversary of WordPress, I’ve been browsing through a few different time capsule posts. Some of them really tap into my nostalgic center while others have me asking questions such as, what ever happened to the Flock browser that WordPress was excited about in 2005? It was described as being just like FireFox but with goodies. If memory serves me right, it was supposed to be a social browser. At any rate, here is a collection of memory lane posts related to WordPress.

Down Memory Lane With WordPress.com – Although this was published in 2009, it gives a great overview of the history of the WordPress.com front page over the years. It’s filled with interesting tidbits such as when the WordPress.com website promoted the Flock browser.

Then & Now: How WordPress Companies Have Looked Over the Years – Published at the end of 2012, not only does this article chronicle the WordPress.org website but a handful of other notable sites as well such as Woothemes, StudioPress and ColorLabs.

A 10 Year Visual History of WordPress.org – While I created a comprehensive history of the WordPress.com domain, Joe Foley of WPMU.org published a visual history of the WordPress.org website which covers all 10 years the website has been around.

A Journey Through Five Years of WordPress Interface. – Published in 2008, Ozh compiled a number of screenshots together showcasing the changes that the WordPress interface has gone through since 0.7.1 to 2.7. Take note of WordPress 2.5 as many consider it one of the worst interface redesigns WordPress has been put through.

A History of Default WordPress Themes – WPLift also published a history of the default themes that have shipped with WordPress. Although these were far and few between, starting with TwentyTen, we can expect to see a new default theme every year.

Brief History Of The Theme Repository – These slides are from Chip Bennett’s presentation at WordCamp Kansas City that delves into the brief history of the WordPress theme repository.

WordPress Archive Project:

While compiling this list of posts, I had a conversation on Twitter with a number of folks discussing the history of WordPress and how it would be cool if we could take various elements of WordPress and create a visual history such as the Login screen or the Post Writing interface. I was told by Siobhan McKeown that she is sort of working on a project like this. She currently has every version of WordPress installed on a local machine in order to create screenshots from one version to the next. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

Bryan Witherwax or @Tweeterwax notified me that their WordPress 10 year anniversary party in Seattle, WA will have a local host setup with every version of WordPress installed so that attendees can see for themselves just how far WordPress has progressed.

@wptavern We have some guys setting up all of the versions of WP on a local host for people to play with for our WP 10yr party in Seattle.

— Bryan Witherwax (@tweeterwax) May 22, 2013

Ryan Hellyer has put together a section of his website that shows off the WordPress 1.0 Post Writing screen as well as the index page right after WordPress 1.0 is installed. In the coming days/weeks, Ryan will be adding different versions of WordPress with static Administration and index pages so we can at least get an idea of what the workflow is like. If you don’t see anything, it’s because the changes have yet to propagate to your DNS server.

I’m also going working on a post that explains what steps to go through to install each WordPress version onto a local host. It’s actually more difficult than you would think, especially for WordPress 0.7.1 which requires it’s own unique PHP.ini file.