Major WordPress update to 5.6

I run about a dozen WordPress sites and whenever an update is available I sigh at the thought of all that could go wrong. Nine out of ten times everything is fine. And to the extent that there is a glitch, it is a minor inconvenience. I am a half empty glass kind of guy, I always think of all the things that can go wrong. Admittedly it is what keeps me more less on the honest side of the ledger.

WordPress 5.6 is out and am in the process of updating my dozen sites with the caution of experience, but with a little piece of mind from that experience. I have to say that I’m impressed by how far WordPress has come. I’ve been using WordPress since 2005 and am glad to see it grow up into the Content Management System (CMS) it is today. I’ve been around and have built sites on several platforms Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Drupal, and Joomla to name a few. I have to say that I do not miss the days of hard coding sites or building them with Flash or desktop wysiwyg HTML editors no longer supported or thought about. In the mid 90’s when I was pounding out my first website in HTML2 I imagined a future when we could do what is possible now, but thought it would have arrived ten years ago. Everyone talked about the future and how fast it was moving, how we could not possibly keep up, I among them. I still remember the TV commercials announcing the “Information Superhighway” and how eager I was to hop on. The internet was open to the public in April of 1993 and it took me a whole year before I was able to log on to a friends computer. Six months later I had my own dialup modem. From that moment forward I was building and rebuilding over and over the same website so I could cut my teeth somewhere. As the rules of engagement in web development increased in complexity they also did with possibilities, those were exciting days. I feel that way again with WordPress.

If you ever wondered about using WordPress or tried it a while ago thought it was not for you due to it’s limitations you might want to revisit it. It has never been more competitive and exciting for content creators and developers alike.

In the spirit of how far we have come since the days before CMS platforms. I want to share a list of sites from the past still online.

Texas Internet Consulting (1987)

San Francisco Fogcam (1994)

Interrupt Technology Corporation (1986)

Welcome to Netscape (1994)