WordPress News Roundup August 2006: The First WordCamp Comes to San Francisco

August 2006 was the month the WordPress community first met in one room. More than 300 people attended the first WordCamp at San Francisco’s Swedish American Hall on August 5, and Matt Mullenweg led the first “State of the Word” discussion. WordPress.com launched major features the day before, and a new theme called Sandbox introduced ideas that theme developers would rely on for years.

WordPress Core Updates

No release came out in August. WordPress 2.0.4, released at the end of July, was current, and work on 2.1 continued.

• Sandbox: Andy Skelton and Scott Allan Wallick released Sandbox, a deliberately plain theme that output rich, semantic class names and the hAtom microformat. Chris Messina explained why it mattered. On the wp-hackers list, some developers suggested it as a possible new default theme for 2.1.

Other WordPress News

• WordCamp 2006: The day began early at the Swedish American Hall. In his wrap-up, Mullenweg said well over 300 people took part and that the State of the Word discussion was especially lively. For next year he promised better sign-in, clearer separate tracks for developers and users, more notice, and a break after the barbecue.
• Big day at WordPress.com: On August 4 WordPress.com launched private blogs, a store for paid upgrades, and custom CSS. About a dozen users were also testing domain mapping.
• GigaOM on WordPress.com: Om Malik’s daily.gigaom.com moved to WordPress.com hosting, a sign that the service could handle professional publications.
• WordPress as a CMS: Blogging Pro published five reasons to use WordPress as a CMS, a theme of the month across the community.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No new WordPress security releases were issued in August. Users were encouraged to make sure they were on the 2.0.4 security release from late July. WordPress.com’s new custom CSS feature let users restyle their blogs while the service kept its ban on template editing and embedded JavaScript, which Mullenweg had pointed to earlier in the year as protection against XSS attacks.

Industry Trends and Insights

Competition picked up. Google released a beta of a rebuilt Blogger that generated pages dynamically instead of republishing static files. Mullenweg noted that this was how WordPress had always worked and called rebuilding “so 2004”. Microsoft released a beta of Windows Live Writer, a desktop blog editor that worked with WordPress, and some of its developers blogged on WordPress.com. For WordPress, desktop editors like this made the XML-RPC publishing interface more important than ever.

Theme of the Month: Sandbox

Sandbox had almost no visual design. Its value was in the markup, which added dynamic body and post classes and microformats so designers could restyle a site entirely with CSS. It influenced later starter themes such as Thematic, and similar generated-class functions later appeared in core.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

WordCamp was Matt Mullenweg’s idea, and the first State of the Word started a tradition: the annual address in which WordPress’s co-founder reviews the project and sets its direction. In August 2006 it was a discussion in a rented hall, followed by Memphis Minnie’s barbecue. It became the event the whole community follows each year.

Looking Ahead to September 2006

After WordCamp, the focus returned to shipping. WordPress 2.1 was still in development, and Automattic was continuing to build out WordPress.com, including domain mapping and services for high-traffic publishers.