WordPress News Roundup April 2006: Automattic Takes Its First Outside Funding

April 2006 was the month Automattic stopped bootstrapping. Matt Mullenweg announced that the company had sold a minority stake to a small group of investors to keep WordPress.com and Akismet fast and stable as they grew. The month began with a joke and ended with more evidence that WordPress was becoming a general-purpose CMS.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

On April 12 Mullenweg explained the funding. WordPress.com was serving 4.2 million hits a day on a handful of servers, and Akismet blocked so much spam that any downtime was immediately noticed. Taking a small amount of capital would let Automattic solve scaling problems before they happened, while it kept hiring slowly in line with revenue and avoiding the “get big fast” model. The next day Toni Schneider named the investors: Polaris Venture Partners, Blacksmith Capital, Radar Partners and CNET. Neither post gave the amount. Later reporting put the round at about $1.1 million.

WordPress Core Updates

There was no release in April. WordPress 2.0.2 was current while 2.1 was being developed.

• WordPattern: On April 1 the dev blog announced a merger of WordPress and Textpattern into “WordPattern”, complete with joke quotes from Dean Allen and Matt Mullenweg. It was an April Fool’s prank.
• From weblog to CMS: O’Reilly’s ONLamp published a tutorial on using WordPress as a full CMS, reflecting how many people were now using Pages and plugins to run entire sites.

Other WordPress News

• Akismet for Movable Type: Automattic released an Akismet plugin for Movable Type, extending the spam service beyond WordPress. Early testers were enthusiastic, including John Battelle.
• Newspapers keep arriving: The Boston Herald was running its Red Sox blog and others on WordPress.
• OpenID: Mullenweg linked to an OpenID plugin for WordPress, an early sign of interest in decentralised identity that would continue through the decade.
• Funding fallout: Mullenweg warned other founders that announcing funding brought an immediate flood of sales emails, from bankers to office brokers.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security releases were issued in April. Mullenweg said Akismet’s scale was now an operational issue: when the service briefly went down on the morning of the funding announcement, users noticed straight away.

Industry Trends and Insights

Investors were spending heavily on social media startups in 2006, and Automattic’s small, careful round stood out. Mullenweg wrote that he had talked to dozens of investors since moving to San Francisco but had no interest in huge valuations and very rapid growth. Offering Akismet to Movable Type users also showed something new: Automattic could earn money and goodwill from bloggers who did not use WordPress.

Theme of the Month: ComicPress

ComicPress, which Mullenweg highlighted this month, turned WordPress into a platform for publishing webcomics, with navigation built around comic strips. It showed how far themes had moved beyond blog layouts, and it became a mainstay of the webcomics community for years.

Plugin of the Month: Spam Karma 2

Akismet was spreading fast, but Dr Dave’s Spam Karma 2, by then at version 2.2, still had loyal users who liked its local, rule-based scoring. Bloggers such as Ed Bott were publicly thanking it in early April for keeping their comment sections clean.

Founder of the Month: Mark Riley

Mark Riley, known in the forums as Podz, was one of the best-known volunteers in the WordPress support forums. Mullenweg named him in the funding announcement as an example of the kind of hire Automattic would make. He was the company’s first employee who was not a developer, and he went on to work on support and on Akismet.

Looking Ahead to May 2006

Automattic planned to spend its new money on infrastructure for WordPress.com and Akismet, and promised to publish more technical detail about its architecture. Development of WordPress 2.1 continued, while the 2.0 branch remained in maintenance.