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WordPress open-source blogging software (formerly b2/cafelog). Includes plug-in development, themes, and other news.

  1. Jul19

    WordCamp 2007 kickoff dinner

    WordCamp kickoff party 2006

    WordCamp 2007 takes place this weekend in San Francisco. Almost 400 WordPress users and developers from all over the world are coming together for two-days of personal publishing workshops. I'm hosting a WordCamp kickoff dinner tomorrow night starting at 6:30 p.m. at Taylor's Automatic Refresher at the Ferry Building. It's our second-annual WordCamp kickoff dinner welcoming visitors from out of town with burgers, beer, and blogs along the San Francisco waterfront.

    Taylor's Refresher is a small business from the Napa Valley that takes advantage of some of the great food combinations the Bay area has to offer. Each attendee will be able to place individual orders with an expected bill between $10-$15 depending on splurge factors such as sweet potato fries, milkshakes, and beer. We'll have a sizable group sitting outside at the long picnic tables (pictured above) cooling off after what should be a pretty warm day. BART and Muni trains stop about a block away at the Embarcadero Station.

    (photo above taken by Scott Beale's camera tentacle during last year's dinner.)

  2. Aug04

    WordPress.com adds paid upgrades

    Free blog hosting site WordPress.com introduced its first paid feature this morning, allowing customers access to their CSS for $15 a year per blog. Free members can still access 40 built-in templates for free and customize their image header and sidebar widgets. Payments are processed through PayPal.

    The site is currently testing custom domain mapping, a likely next upgrade. The combination of custom CSS and domain mapping a la carte upgrades puts Automattic's WordPress.com in direct competition with Six Apart and its TypePad product currently charging $90 a year for a similar feature set.

  3. Jul20

    BloxPress personalized blog sidebars

    BloxPress logo

    BloxPress is a theme and template engine for WordPress that allows viewers of your blog to configure their own widget modules in your sidebars. If Bill likes to view the last 10 comments and Jane likes to see your latest Flickr uploads, they can have both at once with their own configuration.

    Individual user preferences are stored in a cookie and anyone can create their own "blocks" for the system. Check out the demo to see the system in action.

    It's too bad the blocks do not seem to interoperate with any other widget definition format. I'm glad Spaces will be adding Microsoft Gadgets to its sidebar, increasing the usefulness of the format whether it's on a personal start page, desktop sidebar, or blog sidebar.

  4. May24

    PodSession: Startup Do's and Don'ts with Matt Mullenweg of Automattic

    Matt done WordPress style

    Last night Om and I sat down with Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of open-source blogging software WordPress and a recent founder of Automattic to record our latest PodSession. Automattic is a software services company centered around the WordPress blogging platform.

    We chatted about how to successfully scale a new web application. WordPress.com currently hosts about 200,000 blogs with mirrored hosting in San Diego and Dallas. Matt and I agreed that it's best not to over-optimize at the beginning but instead sit back and watch the actual usage of your web application to fine-tune. Check out Cal Henderson's new book, Building Scalable Web Sites for over 300 pages to help keep your site online.

    Om tried to shake things up with a Ruby on Rails vs. PHP showdown, but again it didn't work. David Heinemeier Hansson and I talked about the same issue in our 37signals podcast last December. Pick a programming language you and your engineers are comfortable with, or you can easily pick up based on existing skills. Using existing programming libraries in a given language may sway your decision.

    We talked about spam in the form of fake blogs and/or comment spam. The Akismet plugin has stopped over 40 million spam messages from blog owners and is also being used to identify the creation of spam blog accounts on WordPress.com. With the recent integration of blog search results to mainstream media sites such as Time.com and the Associated Press blog spam now has a new level of visibility and motive for attack. Hopefully startup companies are keeping on top of the problem and related items for "Bush" won't be overwhelmed with camgirls.

    This week's PodSession, Startup Do's and Don'ts, is 22 minutes in length, a 10 MB download.

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  5. May07

    Dave Winer relaunches Share Your OPML

    Two years ago Dave Winer created feeds.scripting.com to help people share lists of feeds and discover other members of the community with similar interests. Winer just relaunched the site at a new URL, share.opml.org, to connect a new community and raise awareness of the OPML file format. The new site was based on Manila and the new site is built on top of WordPress.

    The Share Your OPML site collects lists of feed subscription URLs from its members and presents lists of most popular feeds, individual feed subscribers, and a peek into the lists of other members with similar reading tastes.

    The new site launch comes less than a week after Dave reached a settlement with former contractor Rogers Cadenhead over previous plans to relaunch the same features. Hopefully the site is here to stay and isn't just a political move.

    I always liked the Share Your OPML pages. The public exposure of browsable feed lists introduced me to many new sources of information. Robert Scoble started subscribing to as many feeds as he could find just to be on top of the list, spawning a link blog and a Bloggercon session as people started to wonder if anyone could really keep up with 1300+ feeds.

    I'd like to see lots more features on the new site. Members should be able to subscribe to all of someone else's feeds at once, cloning their reading list. The server should continually poll hosted files for the latest subscription list updates from personal servers as well as large aggregators such as Bloglines or NewsGator. I'd also like to see the unique feeds of someone with a reading list like mine. I might find one or two new sources of information.

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  6. Jan12

    Toni Schneider joins Automattic

    Toni Schneider has left his position at Yahoo! to become CEO of Automattic, the corporate side of WordPress. Toni was previously leading Yahoo!'s API team and his move to Automattic comes less than a month about six months after his golden handcuffs came off from the Oddpost acquisition of June 2004. Om Malik broke the story of Tony's departure this evening on his blog.

  7. Dec26

    WordPress 2.0

    WordPress 2.0 is now available for download from the newly redesigned WordPress.org. The new release includes many behind-the-scenes changes as well as some front-end AJAX goodness. A Subversion update is the best way to upgrade your existing installation.

    My favorite new features:

    • Improved user permissions that allow you to select a role instead of a number.
    • Better importers. WordPress importers can login to other blogging services and suck out your data, comments and all!
    • Abstracted data layer allows future support of various databases and makes plugin development a bit easier.
    • Rich post authoring through a WSYIWYG interface and drag and drop post components. You can even add new categories direct from the posting interface. Users may actually prefer to author their posts through the default interface instead of a desktop tool.
    • Photo attachments are generated as sub-pages complete with its own comments and tracking.
    • Persistent cache. Frequent database queries are cached to disk allowing for faster response times, especially on high-traffic sites.

    WordPress 2.0 also includes the Akismet anti-spam plugin in the default install.

  8. Dec21

    WordPress developers get corporate

    Automattic

    This morning the lead developers of WordPress unveiled a new corporate entity based on the popular open-source blogging platform. The new company, Automattic, employs WordPress lead developers Ryan Boren and Matt Mullenweg, contributing developer Donncha O'Caoimh, and Andy Skelton.

    The new company will provide WordPress consulting services and develop and maintain services such as hosted blogging site WordPress.com and antispam tool Akismet.

    Automattic is a Delaware corporation founded on March 28, 2005 and previously mentioned on this blog as "WordPress Inc." in late March. The company's official launch is meant to coincide with the release of WordPress 2.0 later this month.

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  9. Dec07

    About.com switches from MT to WordPress

    Matt Mullenweg just posted the news that About.com is switching all of its sites from Movable Type to WordPress. About.com is owned by The New York Times and has the largest public-facing blog installation of any company I know. Pretty big news for WordPress as they add another big name media site to their list.

  10. Oct12

    WordPress Germany and Google Maps

    The team over at Deutche WordPress just added the ability to browse WordPress blogs in Germany using Google Maps. Deutche WordPress maintains a searchable directory of WordPress-powered blogs in Germany and each directory level contains a new map overlay of locations. Check out WordPress blogs in Germany focused on soccer for example. Google Maps currently provides no map coverage of Germany so the site is using only the country outline at the moment.

    Tags: ,

Niall Kennedy Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »

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