WordPress Founder, Inventions
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg is the founder developer of WordPress, the world’s most popular open
source blogging platform. Matt Mullenweg Entrepreneur
was born on January 11, 1984 in Houston, Texas, Mullenweg currently lives in San
Francisco, California.
He has devoted the majority of his time to developing a number of open source projects
and is a frequent speaker at conferences, such as Canada's Northern Voice and the
WordCamp events organized around WordPress software. With his creation, blogging
got a new dimension from its just being the sub-domain of blogspot.com. Today millions
of blog writers have turned to WordPress as a blogging platform. Some of the popular
websites that run on WordPress are TechCrunch, Huffingtonpost, Mashable and so on.
In June 2002, almost ten years ago, he went to a vacation to Washington D.C., where
he as a tourist took a lot of photos, after participating in the National Fed Challenge
competition. When back home, he wanted to share the pictures online.
Wordpress Founder started using the b2/cafelog blogging software, but
he wasn’t very pleased with what it offered as functionality and opportunities,
so he reached the decision of developing his own blogging platform, today known
as WordPress.
WordPress touches a lot of people and has gained much appreciation. WordPress is
completely customizable and can be used for almost anything. WordPress initially
started as just a blogging system, but has gradually been used as full content management
system. In addition to online resources like the forums and mailing lists, one can
also use WordPress to attend or volunteer WordCamp, which are free or low-cost events
that happen all around the world to gather and educate WordPress users.
Mullenweg has co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group in March 2004 with
Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik. In April 2004 along with fellow WordPress developer
Dougal Campbell, he launched Ping-O-Matic which is a hub for notifying blog search
engines such as Technorati and currently handles over 1 million pings a day. In
October 2004, he was recruited by CNET to work on WordPress for them and help them
with blogs and new media offerings. Mullenweg and the WordPress team released WordPress
1.5 ‘Strayhorn’ in February 2005, which had over 900,000 downloads. The release
introduced their theme system, moderation features and a new front end and back
end redesign.
WordPress.com was opened up to the world in November 2005 and in December 2005 he
announced Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet (spam filtering
service). Automattic employed people who had contributed to the WordPress project,
including lead developer Ryan Boren and WordPress MU creator Donncha O Caoimh.
In March 2007, Mullenweg was ranked 16 out of 50 Most Important People on the Web
by PC World, reportedly the youngest on the list. In September 2008, his name appeared
in the list of ‘Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30‘by Inc. Magazine and one of the 25
most Influential people on the Web by BusinessWeek, again the youngest on BusinessWeek's
list. In 2009, Matt Mullenweg Entrepreneur was
named an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society for his contributions
to information technology and culture.
