Today is the 10th birthday of WordPress, the platform that powers danfoy dot com, Creative Nottingham, and the majority of other web projects that I’ve worked on over the past 8 years.

WordPress began on 27 May 2003, as a fork of b2 (aka cafelog), and is now by far the most popular blogging platform in the world. It’s a mature and versatile platform, and has its own elegance, despite not being something that I’d describe as ‘lightweight’. ‘Blogging platform’ might be something of a misnomer – it’s grown massively in scale since I started using it around 2005, and can comfortably be used as a whole-site content management system (or CMS). It can be installed on any server that supports the requisite versions of PHP and MySQL. There is also a semi-free hosting service available at wordpress.com.

I’m currently redesigning danfoy.com using WordPress and an awesome adaptive framework called Skeleton. With a little forward planning, Skeleton makes it much easier to design websites which scale gracefully from full-screen web browsers, down to tablets (in portrait or landscape orientation), to mobile phones. It’s going to be awesome. We’ll soon be moving the Creative Nottingham site to a Skeleton-based WordPress site too, with help from Nottingham-based design agency Strafe Creative.