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WordPress’ origins can be traced back to the beginning of 2001 when the blogging solution B2/cafelog was launched by French programmer Michael Valdrighi. B2/cafelog was an innovative solution at the time because it introduced the ability for pages to be created dynamically with a MySQL database. Valdrighi continued to work on B2/cafelog and released version 1.0 in 2002. Shortly afterward, Valdrighi stopped developing his solution. This was particularly unfortunate because B2/cafelog had actually grown its user-base to a reasonable number. These users were left without a supported solution.
In the early parts of 2003, college freshmen Matt Mullenweg wrote on his blog that he wanted to create a fork of B2/cafelog. He had been using the software to post photos from his trip to Washington D.C. He teamed with Mike Little to continue work on this new solution. This was around the same time that Valdrighi made an announcement that Little and Mullenweg would be taking lead on the B2/cafelog fork. The team launched the first version of WordPress in May 2003, using the same structure as B2/cafelog.
The WordPress team continued to grow and friends of Mullenweg like Christine Sellect Tremoulet would also contribute to the project. Tremoulet actually was the one who suggested the name “WordPress”. WordPress v1.0 was released in January 2004 under the code name Davis. Some of the newest features in this release included SEO friendly permalinks, the ability to post to multiple categories, the addition of comment moderation and Atom support. A few months later in May 2004, version 1.2 was released. This was a bit of a landmark release for WordPress because support for plugins was added in this version. Plugins have played a huge part in helping WordPress grow to the levels it has today because of their ability to add just about any functionality you could want to a site.
