WordPress News Roundup April 2005: Mullenweg Apologizes for Hidden Articles as WordPress Launches a Hosting Page

April 2005 began with WordPress’s first real crisis of trust. Matt Mullenweg had to explain why WordPress.org had been hosting hidden, search-optimised articles for money, and his apology became an early lesson in how the community expected its project to behave. By the middle of the month attention had moved to growth: 150,000 downloads of WordPress 1.5 and a new page recommending web hosts.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress deals were announced. The month’s biggest technology deal was Adobe’s agreement to buy Macromedia for about $3.4 billion, which Mullenweg said he first took for a late April Fool’s joke.

WordPress Core Updates

There was no release in April, as work continued on the first 1.5 maintenance update.

• 150,000 downloads: WordPress 1.5.0 passed 150,000 downloads on April 12, less than two months after release.
• Plugin experiments: Developers kept extending 1.5 in directions core would later adopt. One example was a beta versioning plugin that tracked every edit to a post and allowed rollbacks, years before revisions arrived in core.

Other WordPress News

• The hidden articles apology: On April 1 Mullenweg published a long response explaining that he had accepted the advertising deal to make WordPress self-sufficient without venture capital or nagging users for donations. On April 4 he followed with a short summary: not thinking through the consequences, and not consulting the community, had been mistakes, and it would not happen again. He also said WordPress had received more donations in four days than in the previous year.
• Hosting page: On April 14 WordPress.org launched a web hosting page, designed with help from Chris Messina. It listed PowWeb, Blue Host, TextDrive, Laughing Squid and DreamHost, some of which donated part of their fees for referrals back to WordPress.
• Popular Science: The magazine’s “Build Your Own Blog” and “DIY Blogging” articles recommended WordPress alongside Movable Type and Textpattern.
• Ping-O-Matic turns one: Mullenweg’s ping relay service celebrated its first birthday on April 20, just short of a hundred million pings.
• Theme winners: After the March 31 announcement of Alex King’s theme competition results, Mullenweg began setting up the winning themes and drew for the prize he had sponsored.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security advisories were published in April.

Industry Trends and Insights

The open-source CMS field was busy. Drupal 4.6.0 came out mid-month, and Mullenweg noted that it pinged Ping-O-Matic by default, part of a new generation of publishing tools that announced updates automatically. The hidden-articles episode showed something else: as WordPress grew, the traffic and search rank of WordPress.org had become valuable, and the community wanted that value used openly and for the project.

Plugin of the Month: WP Versioning

This beta plugin from Watershed Studio saved a copy of a post every time it changed and let authors restore older versions. Mullenweg said he had wanted something like it for a while. Post revisions finally became a core feature in WordPress 2.6 in 2008.

Host of the Month: PowWeb

PowWeb was at the top of the new WordPress.org hosting page, offering one-click WordPress installation and updates and a promotion of six free months. It was typical of budget hosts of the time, which were starting to compete on how easily they could get someone blogging with WordPress.

Founder of the Month: Chris Messina

Chris Messina, a designer and open-web advocate in San Francisco, helped design the new hosting page and would soon mock up WordPress.org’s theme listings as well. He later became known for co-founding BarCamp and for proposing the hashtag on Twitter, but in 2005 he was one of the volunteers improving WordPress.org’s design.

Looking Ahead to May 2005

WordPress 1.5.1, with a long list of bug fixes, new plugin hooks and a security fix, was close to release. Downloads were heading for 200,000, and the team was working with hosts that offered auto-installs so those installs could be counted too.