WordPress News Roundup August 2005: WordPress 1.5.2 Ships as WordPress.com Sends Its First Invites

August 2005 was split between maintaining the stable branch and showing off what came next. WordPress 1.5.2 rolled up security fixes, invitations to WordPress.com went out, and at the Blog Business Summit Matt Mullenweg gave the first public demo of both WordPress 1.6 and the new hosted service. The download counter, meanwhile, was approaching half a million.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress deals were announced. In the wider open-source world, the Mozilla Foundation moved Firefox and its other products into a new for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. Mullenweg called it interesting and ultimately for the better.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 1.5.2 (August 14): The new 1.5 release fixed bugs, added enhancements requested by plugin authors and addressed all the security issues that had been circulating in the days before. Users who upgraded late that Sunday night were asked to check they had the latest wp-settings.php.
• A first look at 1.6: Owen Winkler published animated screenshots of the WYSIWYG editing coming in the next version. On August 19 Mullenweg gave the first public demo of WordPress 1.6 and WordPress.com at the Blog Business Summit.

Other WordPress News

• WordPress.com invites: Mullenweg explained how invitations to WordPress.com would work. The service was launching in a gradual, invite-only beta.
• Half a million: On August 17 the WordPress download counter was about to pass 500,000.
• SitePoint switches: SitePoint, the web development publisher, moved its blogs to WordPress. Mullenweg noted that SitePoint’s PHP and MySQL tutorial was probably the first one he ever used.
• BarCamp: After the summit, Mullenweg was looking forward to the first BarCamp that weekend, an open, attendee-organised “unconference”. A year later WordCamp would borrow the format.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

WordPress 1.5.2 was the security release of the month, and upgrading was a matter of uploading new files over old ones. Spam was the bigger ongoing threat. Mullenweg wrote that fake and scraped blogs had become so common that he was blocking more than 80 percent of the pings reaching Ping-O-Matic as obvious spam, out of roughly two million legitimate pings a day.

Industry Trends and Insights

Business blogging was now a conference topic, with companies such as Boeing and Microsoft sponsoring the same summit as WordPress. Splogs, automated spam blogs that republished scraped content with ads, were distorting the numbers blog search engines published. In the CMS world, developers left the Mambo project in August to start a fork that would become Joomla, another sign that open-source PHP publishing tools were competing hard for developers.

Founder of the Month: Owen Winkler

Owen Winkler, who blogged at Asymptomatic and built tools at RedAlt, was one of the most active WordPress developers of 2005. He had already given 1.5 users Kubrickr for custom headers, and this month his screenshots gave the community its first look at visual editing in 1.6. In 2006 he co-founded Habari, a new publishing platform.

Looking Ahead to September 2005

More WordPress.com invitations were going out as the service grew. Work on 1.6 continued in Subversion as the team built on the features shown at the summit.