So this is generally billed as my place “for those times between being a geek”, but I’ve decided to post this here even though it definitely blurs that line a little.
For those that don’t know, I do a lot of work with WordPress. For you to really understand why I’m so excited, you need to understand the enormity of what WordPress actually is. WordPress is a content management system that is used to run websites. It’s open source and developed by many people (hundreds), and I’m one of the regular contributors. I’ve contributed code to each of the last 12 versions, starting with version 2.3 more than 5 years ago. WordPress currently powers 17.4% of the top million websites1 and trounces it’s closest competition (Joomla) who has just 2.8% of that same market. It’s latest version, 3.5, was released just three and a half weeks ago on Dec 11, and has already been downloaded 4 million times2. There are nearly 60 million websites running WordPress3. That’s roughly 60 million websites all running some of my code. This includes NBC sports, CNN, Time, Dowjones, UPS, Techcrunch, and many many more4.
This is both extremely exciting and very humbling. The fact that I’ve had the chance to be so involved in such a big chunk of the internet as we know it is just awesome!
Which is why I’m so excited to have been given the chance to co-lead the next version of WordPress with Mark Jaquith. More than just contributing code, this time I get the chance to really step up and help guide this project through it’s next version. We’ve already picked a theme of “content editing” and are working on nailing down the timeline as well as deciding what will go into this version and what will need to be cut and moved to a future version.
It may be a geeky honor, but it’s an honor nonetheless.
1 http://w3techs.com/
2 http://wordpress.org/download/counter/
3 http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
4 http://vip.wordpress.com/clients/
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