Though WordPress has been around for quite awhile now, I would guess that a majority of WordPress users are fairly new to the platform (using it less than 2 years). It wasn’t until about 2006 that WordPress really became widely recognized within the blogosphere. If you are new to WordPress, have you ever found yourself wondering when or how WordPress got started?
Yesterday our friend Keith, who is a writer for Weblog Tools Collection, recently wrote about the evolution of WordPress in his post B2/Cafelog to WordPress 1.0. He chronicles the early years of WordPress (May 2003 through January 2004) and talks about the features that were introduced, many of which we now take for granted.
I think posts like this are fun, but they also help us to appreciate things as they are now and to see how far both WordPress and blogging has come. I switched my first blog to WordPress when WordPress 2.0 was originally released. Within 2-3 days I was hooked and haven’t look back since! Now I even use WordPress to develop most of my non-blogging websites as well.
So, how about you? What was the first version of WordPress you used?
Kyle Eslick
Kyle Eslick is the founder and primary author of WordPress Hacks. You can learn more about him at KyleEslick.com or you can follow his personal tweets here.
Thanks for releasing this version. 
As your site has a lot of widgets, so I think it will significantly reduce the server usage. 
I'd love to do the 301 redirect, but it seems that with Wordpress's canonical URLs, redirects create infinite loops that ...
Great gallery. But I wasted 3 months to find a good free wordpress template and finally no one was customizable ...
I can hardly remember but I’m guessing it was something like 1.8-ish.
Is there anywhere a list of releasedates going back completely?
@ Remkus – You can check out this history of releases.
Oh, and they jumped from the 1.5 branch to 2.0
haha..
go figure. I remember having done something with a version with 1.x but I couldn’t remember which.
When I look at the time line it must have been 1.5 because I started to joke around with WordPress around may 2005. Thanks for the lesson in accuracy
I started with 1.5, right around the time they released it. I’m one of the ones who switched from MovableType (2.3 I think) due to licensing restrictions.
You can also browse older version in trac:
http://trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags
I too started out with 1.5 and thought it was fantastic having just used Blogger previously. WP2.0 was a revelation and it was then that I saw the potential to be a full CMS.
V2.3 gave us more CMS type control from when I also began to develop websites as opposed to blogs in WP. 2.5 was a huge leap forward as a CMS platform enabling much better SEO control.
I’ve just upgraded my current website project to 2.6, having started it in 2.5, and it looks great. The extra control makes the CMS easier still so I’m looking forward to getting to grips with all the new features.
I think the first version I used was 1.2 – and I remember when they introduced the templating system (1.5 I think) it was a real pain to migrate over. But imagine life without that now!
The first version I used was 0.7 something.
It still had a lot of traces of B2 in it, but it has gotten better ever since!