WordPress got released on May 27, 2003, officially by its founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Before that, the b2/cafelog was generally used as a blogging tool that got launched in 2001 by a French developer Michel Valdrighi. PHP, along with MySQL, was used for developing the b2. This tool was mainly meant for writing blogs.
B2 used MySQL for managing databases that offer a search option in the middle of the blogs residing in the database. It was licensed under GPL as an open-source tool, but it had an unmaintained site.
Birth of WordPress:
WordPress, being the successor and source-code extracted from b2/cafelog, was founded by Mike Little along with Matt Mullenweg. Matt Mullenweg, who was a son of a software engineer, and a user community member of b2, installed b2 in his system for his personnel use in the year 2002.
When Michel Valdrighi stopped providing updates of b2 then Matt decided to fork the b2 software to do his blogging. He wrote a blog where he announced to fork the source-code of b2, and Mike Little replied affirming that he is will join Matt in forking and work together. Later, they formed a team of developers, and fewer than ten team members succeeded in creating their version of WordPress on April 1, 2003, and the name of the WordPress was suggested by a friend of Matt, Christine Selleck Tremoulet.
Releases of WordPress:
WordPress’s first version, i.e. version 0.7 was released on May 27, 2003. A subsequent version was again released in January 2004, called the Davis version. After few months of the release of WordPress, b2++ was developed by Donncha O Caoimh from Ireland and Francois planque from France. But, due to various forking done on b2, on 29th May 2003, Michel was sure to make WordPress the official division of b2.
WordPress in the current scenario:
WordPress is now the most popular CMS tool and is expanding day by day and also adding some more features in its every version. New features are getting incorporated in each subsequent version. At present, it is the leading and widely used self-hosted blogging tool in the world having more than millions of users using it on a daily basis.