WordPress News Roundup April 2009: BuddyPress 1.0 Arrives and Automattic Buys Blo.gs

April 2009 ended with one of the most anticipated launches in WordPress’s history. On April 30, BuddyPress 1.0 was released, turning WordPress MU into a full social networking platform with profiles, friends, groups and activity streams. WordPress.org welcomed it as an official sister project the same day.

Before that, the core team spent the month clearing the decks for 2.8 with a 24-hour “has-patch” marathon, Google picked eight students to work on WordPress over the summer, and Automattic added the veteran blo.gs ping service to its growing collection.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• Automattic acquires blo.gs: Yahoo handed the blo.gs update-ping service to Automattic in April. Matt Mullenweg described the move as taking the service into safekeeping with plans to refresh it, and linked it to WordPress history, since blo.gs had inspired an early feature that sorted blogrolls by update time. Terms were not disclosed.
• WP.com domain: Automattic also acquired the WP.com domain from Yahoo, news that surfaced in an April WordPress Weekly interview with Matt Mullenweg.

WordPress Core Updates

There was no release in April, but 2.8 development moved quickly.

• The 24-hour has-patch marathon: With around 500 active tickets assigned to 2.8, WordPress.org invited contributors to a bug hunt while core developers concentrated on bigger features such as the built-in theme installer and new widget management. The marathon ran from the morning of April 16 into April 17 (US Pacific time), and the team published the results afterwards.
• Design tweaks vote: The project asked designers for header and navigation concepts, then put them to a public vote. The poll results recorded 2,651 votes, with the team confirming that 2.8 would not carry a major style overhaul.
• Contributing, Part II: A follow-up post explained new ways for graphic designers to contribute, building on the earlier icon contest.

Other WordPress News

• BuddyPress 1.0: Andy Peatling announced BuddyPress 1.0 on April 30, and WordPress.org followed with “Make Friends with BuddyPress”. At this stage it required WordPress MU and would not run on a standard single-site install. Shortly before release, Peatling changed the plugin’s credits so it was attributed to the community rather than to him alone.
• Summer of Code students: Google selected eight students to work on WordPress in 2009, from almost 60 applications.
• Plugin competition returns: Weblog Tools Collection announced another round of its annual plugin competition, encouraging developers to release new plugins over the summer.
• Agencies productise support: WebDevStudios launched WordPress support packages, an early sign of service businesses forming around maintenance work.
• Header challenge criticism: Some contributors objected that the 2.8 header design challenge required submissions in Photoshop’s proprietary PSD format.
• Open source premium themes: Matt Mullenweg publicly praised the Gorilla Project, which aimed to produce premium-quality themes under open licenses.

Industry Trends and Insights

BuddyPress changed the conversation about what WordPress could be. A few years earlier, a self-hosted social network meant expensive bespoke software; now a WordPress MU install and a free plugin could provide member profiles and groups. That made WordPress a realistic option for universities, clubs and companies weighing hosted networks such as Ning.

• Theme frameworks multiply: WP Tavern catalogued the many theme frameworks that had appeared over the year, a trend that would dominate premium theme development through 2010.
• Switchers from other CMSs: Developer posts about leaving Drupal for WordPress circulated widely, adding to the sense that WordPress was winning over people who had previously dismissed it as “just a blog.”

Theme of the Month: Thesis

Chris Pearson’s Thesis was the best-known commercial theme framework of the moment, popular with bloggers for its typography and its options panel that let non-coders adjust layouts. As April’s round-ups of frameworks showed, it set the template that many competitors were chasing, though its proprietary license would later put it at the centre of a long dispute with WordPress’s leadership.

Plugin of the Month: BuddyPress

BuddyPress 1.0 brought member profiles, friend connections, private messaging, groups and activity streams to WordPress MU. It was the most ambitious plugin the community had yet seen, and its April 30 release marked the moment WordPress began to be taken seriously as a platform for online communities.

Host of the Month: Laughing Squid

San Francisco’s Laughing Squid, run by Scott Beale, combined web hosting with deep roots in the city’s tech and arts community and was a familiar name on WordPress.org’s hosting recommendations. Hosts with a community focus were a natural fit for a project that was increasingly organising itself through local meetups and WordCamps.

Founder of the Month: Andy Peatling

Andy Peatling created BuddyPress and led it to 1.0 in April after Automattic brought the project in-house in 2008. His decision to credit the community rather than himself, made days before release, reflected the open way he wanted the project to grow.

Looking Ahead to May 2009

May was expected to bring the first beta of WordPress 2.8. WordCamp San Francisco, the flagship event and the venue for Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word, was scheduled for May 30, with several regional WordCamps also on the calendar.