This week David Bisset announced a new project to celebrate WordPress’s 19th anniversary, coming up on May 27. David is probably known to many in the WordPress space as a prolific tweeter of WordPress-adjacent memes and links, as well as the host of the Post Status Excerpt podcast (recent highlights include an interview with the team behind BlackPress and Rich Tabor on Full Site Editing).
To get involved in the month leading up to the anniversary, visit wp19.day to share your tweets, photos, and videos about what WordPress means to you. On the big day itself, there are plans for two live shows: an earlier Twitter Spaces event and a larger Zoom “mega meetup”.
David told me that the idea came from a conversation with his daughter, Olivia, about creating “a positive event celebrating not just WordPress but the community that has helped it for nearly two decades.”
I think it’s important to show how communities (WordPress, Minecraft, etc.) can have a variety of diverse people with diverse skills and interests.
David
As someone who has also watched one of their kids slowly take a stab at setting up their own personal website (my daughter’s opinion on Full Site Editing would require another article entirely), I was more than impressed when he gave me a larger list of her accomplishments, including volunteering and speaking at WordCamps. Though I’ll admit I’m sorry she wasn’t around for the days of Geocities and Angelfire, in the last millennium, where web developers were forged.
As WordPress nears the end of its second decade in existence, and moves from a hobbyist’s playground to a massive segment of the internet economy, it really is crucial for us to find ways to allow the next generation to gain traction and even want to be engaged with this project (for more on this, you can peruse Nyasha’s article on gatekeeping in WordPress). For WordPress to continue to thrive, it has to balance that continuum of backwards compatibility and forwards-thinking. Seeing that next generation step up to the plate makes me feel more encouraged that we’re not heading towards a JJ Abrams situation – tons of potential but clearly no endgame in sight.
I’ll be working on my #wp19day story and I encourage you to do the same. Meanwhile, I was wondering if this was perhaps a trial run towards a larger 20th anniversary celebration next year, and David, like a true developer, has reassured me that he already has the domain name purchased.
