Remember 2005? Sin City was big at the box office, Hollaback Girl was on the radio, and WordPress was at version 1.5.

Lets take a look back and see how amazing WordPress was back then. Keep in mind their site was run off the latest and greatest version of WordPress at that time.

Look at those features. Instant publishing, multiple categories, blogrolling! Man, this is amazing stuff.

Check out the new post screen. No tags, no preview, no WYSIWYG, no admin sidebar. Talk about a nice, clean, simple layout. Wait, how do I add in an image? Maybe that’s under the ‘Advanced Editing’ section.

I like how Matthew (formal name) Mullenweg is head of bug creation. If you check out WordPress.org today, you’ll see that that’s still his title. Ryan Boren has been promoted to Bug Whisperer however.

I like the nice big buttons. Sadly, the black and white doesn’t ‘pop’ as much as the current blue ones. But they are much bigger so I guess that’s good.

Wow, look at those support forums. Look at all those newb questions! Organization is done solely by tag too. Tags are still one of the most confusing features in WordPress. Are they useful or not? Their kind of the same as categories, yet different.

Who needs thousands of themes when you can have 7?! Where are the plugins?

Codex, you were amazing even back then. Documentation is one thing many developers skimp on but not WordPress.

WordPress.com wasn’t anything more than a landing page. It opened to beta testers on August 8, 2005 and opened to the public on November 21, 2005. This screen shot was taken from July so it wasn’t quite ready yet.

Back in 2005 Blogger and LiveJournal had more interest among Google users than WordPress. MovableType and TypePad was big too, but even at that time WordPress had more people talking about them.

It’s amazing how far WordPress has come. It completely blows away the competition now and is the industry leader among content management systems.

It’s been stated that 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress which says a lot. Additionally WordPress powers 14.7% of the top million websites. No other software can even begin to compare.

On top of that 35.0 million new posts are created every month on WordPress.com alone. That’s a lot of cat and bacon pictures.

I love being a WordPress developer and a part of their amazing community. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

What’s your favorite WordPress memory from versions ago?

Thanks to the Wayback Machine for the screenshots and Google Trends for the popularity data.