WordPress News Roundup December 2006: WordPress 2.1 Nears as WordPress.com Opens Its Stats

December 2006 closed a year in which WordPress grew from a popular blogging script into a family of products and a company. WordPress 2.1 was close enough that the dev blog published a guide to help plugin developers prepare. WordPress.com redesigned its homepage and made almost all of its internal statistics public. The community got its first official merchandise.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress deals were announced. In the wider blogging market, PayPerPost bought Performancing Metrics, the blog analytics product from Performancing, though Performancing’s ad and Firefox products were not part of the deal. Matt Mullenweg, a vocal critic of undisclosed paid posts, called the buyer distasteful.

WordPress Core Updates

On December 11 the dev blog ran a guest article by Aaron Brazell on preparing plugins for WordPress 2.1, which it said was almost here.

• Table variables removed: The old $table* variables were removed from core, not just deprecated. Plugins were told to use the global $wpdb object, for example $wpdb->posts.
• Table prefix: $table_prefix gave way to $wpdb->prefix for finding the database prefix.
• Link categories merged: Link categories became part of the main categories table instead of having a separate table.

WordPress 2.0.5 remained the stable release for the rest of the year.

Other WordPress News

• Opening the books: On December 7 Mullenweg announced that WordPress.com had published about 99 percent of its internal aggregate statistics, everything except its PayPal graphs.
• WordPress.com redesign: A new WordPress.com homepage design went live on December 14, with a flexible layout in which sidebar tags moved below the content in narrow windows.
• Limited T-shirts: After requests from people who missed SxSW and WordCamp, WordPress began selling limited-run shirts through Goodstorm. Each design would be printed only once. Shipping was US-only at first.
• Migration help: Mullenweg built a small web service that split large Movable Type and TypePad export files into chunks WordPress could import more easily.
• Akismet everywhere: The social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia integrated Akismet to fight spam, showing the service spreading beyond blogs.
• WordPress on the Wii: A plugin optimised WordPress blogs for the Nintendo Wii’s browser, just in time for the holidays.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security releases were issued in December. Spam stayed the main battle. After a TypePad user described being blocked from their own blog by its anti-spam system with no way to appeal, Mullenweg argued that TypePad and Blogger should offer Akismet, or let users choose any anti-spam service through an open API endpoint.

Industry Trends and Insights

At the end of the year, Mullenweg noted Niall Kennedy’s report that Google Blog Search had overtaken Technorati in market share according to Hitwise, a sign that general search companies were absorbing blog-specific services. Mullenweg also shared a New Yorker column arguing that companies focused on market share over profit tend to do worse, a quiet comment on the growth-at-all-costs mood of 2006.

Founder of the Month: Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell, a developer and blogger who later wrote WordPress Bible, wrote the dev blog’s guide to 2.1’s database changes. It was the kind of practical, plugin-focused documentation the growing ecosystem needed as the core changed underneath thousands of extensions.

Looking Ahead to January 2007

Everything pointed to WordPress 2.1 in the new year. In the end, a 2.0.6 security release arrived on January 5, 2007, and WordPress 2.1 “Ella”, named after Ella Fitzgerald, followed on January 22.