Well, here is something you don’t get to read every day. Byrne Reese who was the former product manager of Movable Type and TypePad as well as an employee of Six Apart from 2004-2008 wrote a great article outlining the various facets that have contributed to the success of WordPress. It’s a great post because it comes from someone that was in the trenches for the competition.
I’ve been involved in the WordPress community since 2007 but in reading the Codex as well as various articles from the past, it seemed as though one of the biggest reasons that WordPress was able to generate a strong nucleus of developers and an exponentially growing user base was because of the licensing fiasco that took place in 2004. It was one of those events in time that if it didn’t happen, who knows if WordPress would still be in existence today. Since then, WordPress has become the cream of the crop for web publishing. However, the article is a good read because of the insights that are learned from the mistakes that were made by Six Apart which played a role in their demise as a market leader.
I also recommend reading Mark Jaquiths comment on the post as he said something that I think more people need to realize.
It is worth distinguishing between Automattic/WordPress.com vs. Six Apart and WordPress/WordPress.org vs. Movable Type. Movable Type is a Six Apart product, but WordPress is not an Automattic product. It is an independent project that Automattic contributes to. But the community is much bigger than that (take me, for example, an independent). The rivalry between Six Apart and Automattic is a run-of-the-mill business rivalry, and one I’m glad I could sit out. The rivalry between Movable Type and WordPress was different. It was about a product versus a project.
Remember, at the end of the day, choose and use the best publishing system for the job. WordPress can do many things but it can’t do everything which is why it’s great to know there are alternatives available.
In this long awaited live edition of WordPress Weekly, I gave everyone a detailed description as to my whereabouts within the past few months. I then went through some news stories that caught my eye during the week. The show ended with a 20 minute interview with Brad Williams discussing his work with WebDevStudios.com, Pluginize, WPClassroom.com and a few other projects he’s working on. I hope I can get back to doing these shows on a regular basis.
On the next episode of WordPress Weekly, I’ll be playing an interview with Chip Bennett discussing various facets of the WordPress Theme Review Team as well as the review guidelines.
The 2010 Google Summer Of Code program for WordPress is just about ready for prime time. The Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. It was created in 2005 and continues to this day. Thanks to some willing students in 2009, we saw the creation of a new search API, and a theme framework in Elastic. When comparing the projects list from 2010 to 2009, they haven’t changed much although bbPress has been added to the list this year.
One of the project ideas that caught my eye was Template Versioning.
WordPress saves post revisions, but changes to theme files are not recorded, though the presentation layer is sometimes just as important. Build a versioning system for template files within the theme editor.
I wonder if any willing student will snatch up this project. This project idea also confirms that the built in theme editor isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
For any students who want to participate in the WordPress GSoC project, you’re encouraged to review the application template from 2008 as well as the ideas from last year. However, the best way to increase your chances of being selected is to start learning the WordPress code base right now and submit a few patches so the mentors can get a basic idea of your abilities.
Good luck to any student who pursues one of the listed project ideas.
For those interested in the handbook project that is just now getting off the ground, I highly encourage you to check out this latest post by Jane Wells on the WP Docs mailing list. A post about this will be published on the WordPress Dev blog in the near future.
The WP Synergy Project formerly known as the Gorilla Theme Project that I told you about back on April 27th is still going. According to a blog post by project creator Jeeremie, the project is steadily gaining steam. Since April, the project gained a new name which I’m very happy to have had a hand in, a new logo, project management and all sorts of other goodies. The infrastructure of the open project is as follows:
http://dev.wpsynergy.org/: P2 WordPress theme for any discussion related to development. If you want to Join our team start by creating an account there.
If I were not so darn busy, I would be participating more in this project as I think it’s really cool what those guys are doing. WP Synergy is currently working on a theme called PigNews which I’ve been anxiously waiting to see released for quite some time now. Based on the screenshots, this is one of the few themes that I have seen present a lot of content while not overdoing it and still providing breathing room for other elements on the site.
Help Them Out:
The Synergy guys need your help if you can afford your expertise or time.
If you are a designer or developer, there’s many way to be involved in this project. As a designer, we need you to create stunning themes, design mascots, logos, icons… As a developer, we need you to enhance our themes with options page, add AJAX effects, configure servers, develop our Options theme Framework… and we need everyone to spread the word (on twitter, Facebook, on your blog…) to move this project forward and take it to the next level.
I believe I’ve helped out a bit with this blog post!
There was an interesting post published on WPCandy.com by JD Bentley where he discussed three different ways in which WordPress could be used as a project management application. JD describes three different ways to accomplish this functionality. Using a plugin called WP-Project, using the P2 theme, or using a vanilla install of WordPress. However, JD notes that none of these solutions matches what BaseCamp can do either because the solution is too simple or the feature set is too complex.
JD has recently got involved with the development of WP-Project as he believes the plugin has a lot of potential. If you’re interested in helping out with this aspect of WordPress which Ryan Imel says is ripe for innovation, get in touch with him.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com has revamped their home page by presenting a clean layout of the services they own along with the non-profit open-source projects they support.
I like this new way of presenting the projects page which used to show the same information. This clearly shows the projects they support that they don’t directly own/operate which I hope clears some of the confusion people have with thinking Automattic is the development force behind WordPress.org.
For some reason this morning, I was browsing the web and came across the Ping-O-Matic website and noticed in the footer that the servers the site runs on were donated by Automattic. This peaked my curiosity so I browsed the Automattic website to see if Ping-O-Matic was listed as a sponsored project. It’s not. However, if you view the Automattic blogs page, the site is mentioned at the bottom with the following text:
Ping-O-Matic isn’t an Automattic project, but it shares some of the same folks and is highly relevant to the blog ecosystem, so it’s worth including here anyway.
This left me wondering why servers were donated to Ping-O-Matic without it being labeled a sponsored project while the service was mentioned on the Automattic blogs page. As it turns out, Ping-O-Matic is a Matt Mullenweg project created on April 20th, 2004. The purpose of the site is simple. To ping multiple, popular services so that your blog post is indexed on those sites which results in an increase in traffic. The site currently lists 21 different services that you can ping at one time with 5 specialized services. I can’t help but comment that the logo image as well as the overall look and feel of the site scream 1990s to me but it gets the job done.
List Of Ping Options
One thing I did notice though last night is that the stats page for Ping-O-Matic appears to be broken. All I see is a giant, blank, green square. Let me know in the comments if you see the same thing. In the past, this area of the site featured all sorts of data that you could play with.
Another thing that I found a bit disappointing is the Ping-O-Matic blog. Updates regarding the service were frequent from January 2006 to April 2006 and since then, not one update has been published to the site. Some folks would automatically consider the site dead or at least the development aspect of it if a blog hasn’t been updated in over two years. But, Ping-O-Matic works just fine and if you use the following URL http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in your WRITING SETTINGS under Update Services, WordPress will automatically send out the ping for you to the various services it supports.
Questions
So in the end, we have a nice pinging service that can easily be plugged into the back end of WordPress. It’s not sponsored by Automattic and appears to be under complete control by Matt. The blog for the service has not been updated in over two years and while everything regarding the service works just fine, I wonder if Ping-O-Matic is just one of those loose ends that has become forgotten in light of the entire WordPress project. I’d rather have the dev blog for Ping-O-Matic either updated with a post or just hide the thing so it doesn’t look like the site or blog has been neglected for over two years.
Do you use Ping-O-Matic? As for myself, I don’t automatically ping any sites and do things the manual way. Don’t want to get banned for pinging too much. If you don’t want to use Ping-O-Matic, you don’t have to. Check out this article on the Codex which contains a wide assortment of replacement pinging services you can add to the Update Services box.
Well, here is something you don’t get to read every day. Byrne Reese who was the former product manager of Movable Type and TypePad as well as an employee of Six Apart from 2004-2008 wrote a great article outlining the various facets that have contributed to the success of WordPress. It’s a great post because it comes from someone that was in the trenches for the competition. 
In this long awaited live edition of WordPress Weekly, I gave everyone a detailed description as to my whereabouts within the past few months. I then went through some news stories that caught my eye during the week. The show ended with a 20 minute interview with Brad Williams discussing his work with 
