Do you remember your first encounter with WordPress? I do. Looking back at how different things were then, I truly believe it’s grown much easier to get started. And we have so much more control when considering design options. This post is day 2 of the FromBlogsToBlocks campaign, celebrating WordPress 20th anniversary.
I first installed WordPress on my own domain in 2006, I believe. At the time, WordPress was still exclusively a blogging platform. Pages were not yet introduced, nor were widgets or custom post types. I had to build the database and configure my config file manually. At the time, many folks opted to install WordPress within a folder of their website. At the time, I believe my site was configured to be courtneyengle.com/wordpress. The top site was built with, get this, Joomla. But the blog content portion was WordPress. What a crazy configuration.
The default theme was also commonly referred to as Kubrick. It appeared the way you see in the information below.
It would be at least several years until WordPress was truly ready to shine as a fully-fledged content management system (CMS), and shed the idea that it was just a blogging platform. By 2009 I had moved my WordPress subdomain install to the top level of my domain. I changed themes a few times and began blogging more consistently on the site. Traces of the original installation are still around on my site today. I have since changed my domain name a few times, but I keep the old posts to show how far WordPress and I have come in all that time.