Weller’s (2020) Web 2.0 chapter tells the classic origin story: open source as liberation, free tools taking the technical hurdles out of publishing, no gatekeeper standing between you and hitting “post.” That’s the story WordPress tells about itself too, usually right before someone asks why their course plugin won’t talk to their quiz plugin.

Here’s the part that made me laugh, in the way you laugh when something is a little too true: WordPress didn’t win its first big wave of users by being better. It won them because its biggest rival got greedy. In 2004, Movable Type announced it would start charging per blog, and half the internet packed its bags for WordPress in the space of about two weeks. Openness didn’t beat a business decision on its own merits. It was just standing there, free, when the bill came due for everyone else.

Fast-forward to 2010, and WordPress ships the custom post type API, which is a fancy way of saying “any plugin can now invent its own kind of content and store it right alongside everything else.” This is the same generous, no-questions-asked openness that won the Movable Type refugees six years earlier. It’s also exactly how Sensei and LearnDash, both launched in 2013, ended up living on the same platform while being total strangers to each other’s data. Ask either one to hand off a course to the other and you’ll get the software equivalent of a shrug. “Anyone can build here” turned out to be a very different promise than “what gets built will actually get along.”

So WordPress didn’t wander off its founding principle somewhere along the way. It’s been remarkably consistent. The plugin marketplace, chaos and all, is just that principle wearing its work clothes.

Claire’s post this week nails the version of this that runs through social media: free until the business model quietly needs you to be the product. WordPress’s version is gentler, since nobody’s selling your data. It just never noticed that “open” and “plays well with others” aren’t actually the same word, and spent a decade building on top of that assumption before anyone thought to check.

References

Weller, M. (2020). 25 years of ed tech. Athabasca University Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01