Happy 17th birthday, WordPress: collection of useful birthday plugins & cool WP facts

17 years ago, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little launched the first version of what has grown into a feature-rich and user-friendly enterprise-level CMS. WordPress has broken all records of popularity among its counterparts in the CMS niche. Its latest version alone, WordPress 5.4, has been downloaded 27+ million times.

WordPress' birthday is an especially big day for our web agency. This CMS helps us make our customers happy by implementing their web development ideas fast and at very reasonable prices. We create great sites and also provide WordPress support and maintenance to always keep them fresh, relevant, and smoothly working.

Happy birthday, WordPress! To mark the event, we decided to make a collection of useful WordPress plugins related to birthday reminders, emails, calendars, and so on. We also share a few interesting facts from WordPress history and present days. Let’s get this virtual birthday party started!

Did you know these interesting facts about WordPress?

• WordPress core developers love jazz, so every WordPress release is named in honor of some jazz artist. Among the latest ones are Bebo (Bebo Valdés), Betty (Betty Carter), Jaco (Jaco Pastorius), Kirk (Rahsaan Roland Kirk), and Adderley (Nat Adderley).

• A cool historical fact is that the WordPress logo with its unique “W” was created in early 2005 by Jason Santa Maria, visually refined by Matt Miklic (also known as Matt Thomas), and further adjusted for better proportions by Hugo Baeta.

• WordPress has a very cute mascot — Wapuu. Its concept was created by the Japanese illustrator Kazuko Kaneuchi as a gift to the WordPress community. The name “Wapuu” was selected based on the poll. Every WordCamp gets its own Wapuu variation.

• There are 56,300+ plugins on WordPress.org to extend your website with any feature you could want. According to the best practices of a free and open-source CMS, they are free (or have both a free and a premium version). In addition, there is a wealth of commercial plugins available.

• The most popular WordPress plugins get millions of active installations! Here are a few of the top ones with 5 million installations each: Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, Akismet Anti-Spam, Classic Editor, WooCommerce, Jetpack by WordPress.com, and Elementor Page Builder.

• WordPress has such a sociable and big community that, 1066 WordCamp conferences have already been held across the globe. It all began with the Camp in San Francisco organized in 2006 by the WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

• It’s birthday time, and we already have jazz music on this blog, so let’s add some dancing! WordPress has its own unofficial dance called the WordPress Wiggle. At WordCamp Denver, the famous developer Zack Katz introduced the music video 'WordPress is People (Do The WordPress Wiggle)'.

WordPress birthday reminder plugins

It wouldn’t be a blog post about WordPress without some smart plugin reviews. The topic will be… birthdays! Can WordPress send birthday emails, reminders, and similar things? Sure!

There are cool WordPress plugins out there that help website admins and users never miss someone's birthday. Of course, greetings can be accompanied by special offers. All of this will help you boost sales, personalize your user's experiences, and build long-term relationships with customers. Let’s take a look.

WooCommerce BirthdayReminder (premium)

The WooCommerce BirthdayReminder plugin allows online store administrators to automatically send greetings with coupons on customers’ birthdays once the customers have entered their birthdates upon registration. Among its features are unique discount codes, manual sending option, easy editing of birthdays for customers, percentage or fixed discount amounts, and more.

Birthday Reminder For WooCommerce (premium)

The Birthday Reminder For WooCommerce is another plugin for WooCommerce stores that allows admins to send timely greetings with promotions and coupons on the occasions of customers’ birthdays. The plugin is customizable in WooCommerce settings. It’s possible to send these greetings on the first day of the month, a few days before the birthday and on the day of.

WooCommerce Special Occasion Reminder (premium)

The WooCommerce Special Occasion Reminder helps you send your customers timely reminders on important occasions (birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, state holidays, etc.). Of course, these emails also contain your special offers and discounts and encourage customers to buy gifts for their family and friends. Users can configure their event reminders, create and delete the events. Admins also have a handy interface with many options.

BP Birthday Greetings

The BP Birthday Greetings plugin allows you to send birthday greeting notifications. The plugin offers a BuddyPress Birthdays widget to display a list of birthdays in the sidebar. Alternatively, a shortcode can be used. It’s easy to send greetings via the messaging functionality of BuddyPress social networking suite.

Birthday Emails (free)

The Birthday Emails is a simple plugin that automatically sends email greetings to members based on the birth dates they have entered in WordPress or BuddyPress. The emails can be customized. You can also set up notifications about each sent email.

This Day In History (free)

Here is a plugin that allows you to display the selected events on your WordPress site through a widget or shortcodes. It’s called This Day In History. There are shortcodes available to display the events as a list or as a table. The plugin has plenty of options as to showing the event age, day, month, year, link, and more.

A special gift for you on WordPress’ birthday!

Birthdays are a time for gifts and all the best things to happen. What about a great business website that serves your business goals in the best ways? You can enjoy really nice prices from us.

Our WordPress web development team will be glad to build it for you or optimize your current site (update it to the latest version of WordPress, install newer plugins, clean it up from bugs, boost its performance, and create new functionality, and so on). Consultations are free, so there is nothing that prevents you from contacting us right now.

Happy 17th birthday to WordPress!