Ah they grow up so quickly…the young ones that you nurture. Next thing you know another year has passed.

Today, May 27, 2010 marks the 7th anniversary/birthday of WordPress. On this day in 2003 Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) posted on the WordPress development blog that,”…I am very happy to announce that the first release of WordPress is now available for download.”

A quick list of the features and functionality that was in this first release is:

• Texturize — So good it’ll make your quotes curl.
• WordPress Links — A link manager with everything you’d expect, from Weblogs.com support to a handy bookmarklet. Manage as many blogrolls as you like, and have complete control over their display.
• XHTML 1.1 — WordPress is complaint with XHTML standards up to 1.1, though by default it sends a 1.0 document type to avoid compatibility issues.
• Highly Intelligent Line Breaks — Occasionally called “nl2br on steroids,” this brand new function adds line breaks except where there is already a block level tag or another line break.
• New Administration Interface — We’ve made it as simple as possible, and no more. Everything has been restructured from the ground up in a fully compliant XHTML/CSS interface.
• Manual Excerpts — This allows you to handcraft summaries of your posts to appear in your RSS feed and other places.
• New Default Templates — Again we’ve streamlined theses with the latest in simple, easy-to-understand standard XHTML and CSS. And not a CSS hack in sight.
• Plus numerous behind the scenes code cleanups, making this release faster and more stable than ever.

According to Code Wrangler and VIP Support contact, Alex Mills (@Viper007Bond), the Automattic team gets to celebrate by having a day off.

Congratulations on the milestone team. On the verge of WordPress 3.0 being released, you all deserve the recognition and rewards of your efforts.

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