News Courtesy of WordPress.org:
Local Communities Celebrate the 15th Anniversary of WordPress
Last Sunday, May 27, WordPress turned 15 years old. This is a noteworthy occasion for an open-source project like WordPress and one well worth celebrating. To mark the occasion, WordPress communities across the world gathered for parties and meetups in honor of the milestone.
Altogether, there were 224 events globally, with a few more of those still scheduled to take place in some communities — attend one in your area if you can.
If your city doesn’t have a WordPress meetup group, this is a great opportunity to start one! Learn how with the Meetup Organizer Handbook, and join the #community-events channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.
Ryan’s Take 
When I first heard of WordPress way back when I equated to just another blog site like livejournal. I never dreamed that it could become a staple in the website design community. The fact that it remains open source and available for personal and commercial use is a testament to the goals of the developers. They could have easily started to charge a licensing fee to make some serious cash. I think, because of their open source model, it has been a magnet for developers from all corners.
Plugins, themes, and extensions are great ways for these developers to provide a specific feature and get paid for it. Of course, there are a lot of excellent free themes and plugins. Some of them provide adequate functionality while allowing you to upgrade to Pro features for a fee. Because they are all written to be compatible with WordPress, configuration and setup should be minimal in most cases.
If you compare content management systems across the board, WordPress dominates them all with a total of 60% market share. The next highest market shares? Joomla and Drupal at 6.6% and 4.4% total. After using and building with WordPress for several years now, I had the opportunity to convert a client’s website from Joomla to WordPress. What a difference in interfaces. WordPress is easy to learn but also very powerful. Joomla, on the other hand, made me feel like a lost child. It took some time to navigate through the backend just to get the assets and content needed to port over. Suffice it to say, I’m glad WordPress is standing tall.. and will do so for years to come.
