WordPress News Roundup December 2005: WordPress 2.0 “Duke” Ships as Automattic Steps Out

December 2005 ended the year with the biggest WordPress release yet. WordPress 2.0 “Duke” redesigned the admin, added visual editing and bundled Akismet. A week earlier, Matt Mullenweg had introduced Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet, together with a hosting deal with Yahoo. Big publishers were switching too.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• Automattic goes public: On December 20 Automattic.com replaced its placeholder with information about the team behind WordPress.com and Akismet. Mullenweg said this was what he had been working on since leaving CNET.
• Yahoo partnership: The same day, WordPress.org added Yahoo Web Hosting to its hosting page. Yahoo’s Small Business team offered a few-clicks install of WordPress 2.0 with Akismet. A similar deal with Movable Type had been announced the week before.

WordPress Core Updates

A 2.0 release candidate arrived on December 20, and WordPress 2.0 was released on December 26, 2005, according to the official version history. The full announcement on the dev blog came at the end of the month. It was named after Duke Ellington.

• Redesigned admin: The backend was overhauled for looks and usability, with Ajax touches such as adding categories while writing, drag-and-drop panels on the write screen, and comments that faded out when deleted.
• WYSIWYG editing: Andy Skelton and the TinyMCE team built a rich text editor that users could resize while writing or turn off in their profile.
• Bundled plugins: Akismet and Skippy’s WordPress Database Backup shipped with the download.
• Inline uploading: Images, audio and video could be uploaded from the post screen, and each attachment got its own permalink.
• Roles and capabilities: A new user system with roles and capabilities, which Ryan Boren explained early in the month, took over from the old numeric user levels as the main permission model.
• A new WordPress.org: The site also launched a new design by Matt Thomas, which Mullenweg highlighted alongside the release.

Other WordPress News

• About.com switches: Mullenweg reported that About.com, one of the busiest sites on the web, was quietly moving its blogs from Movable Type to WordPress, customising it only through plugins.
• A million spams: Akismet passed one million spam comments blocked on December 30, about two months after launch.
• London meetup: Mullenweg travelled to London, where the community organised a WordPress meetup.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No security releases were issued in December. Version 2.0 changed several security-related systems, including roles and capabilities, and the announcement advised users to back up and deactivate plugins before upgrading because so much code had changed.

Industry Trends and Insights

The Yahoo deal, in which WordPress and Movable Type sat side by side, made it clear that WordPress was now on an equal footing with Six Apart’s flagship. Switches by About.com and others showed a pattern that would continue for years: large publishers on Movable Type moving to WordPress. Ruby on Rails 1.0, released in mid-December, promised a different way to build web applications, but PHP and WordPress were still the default for publishing.

Host of the Month: Yahoo! Web Hosting

Yahoo was one of the largest web companies to bundle WordPress with its hosting plans. It installed version 2.0 with Akismet in a few clicks, and for many small businesses it was their first introduction to self-hosted WordPress.

Founder of the Month: Andy Skelton

Andy Skelton led the WYSIWYG work that made 2.0’s editor possible and was part of the small team running WordPress.com. He would go on to build the widgets system and co-create the Sandbox theme in 2006, making him one of the most influential engineers at early Automattic.

Looking Ahead to January 2006

Major releases always produce a round of bug reports, and a 2.0.x maintenance release was expected once feedback came in. Automattic, now public, was expected to grow its small team.