WordPress News Roundup February 2003: Texturize Takes Shape as Google Buys Blogger’s Parent Pyra Labs

February 2003 was a quiet month for the b2 fork that would become WordPress. There was still no project name, no public code and no announcement. Most of the visible work came from Matt Mullenweg’s own blog, where he kept building the small text-handling tools that would become part of WordPress’s character.

The wider blogging world had a much bigger month. Google bought Pyra Labs, the company behind Blogger, a clear sign that personal publishing was becoming serious business.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No deals involved b2 or the fork. The month’s headline deal was elsewhere in blogging:

• Google acquires Pyra Labs: News broke in mid-February that Google had bought Pyra Labs, the maker of Blogger, for an undisclosed sum. Most reports date the deal to February 17. Mullenweg noted it on his blog on February 19, calling it a big shake-up.

WordPress Core Updates

There was no WordPress release or repository yet. The work that mattered happened in Mullenweg’s scripts:

• Curly quotes: On February 19, Mullenweg wrote that his smart-quotes code was almost working after switching his PHP approach to preg_split. Two days earlier, his to-do list had included making it work alongside autop.
• Texturize introduced (February 23): He introduced Texturize, a filter that turns straight quotes and prime marks into proper typographic characters while leaving HTML tags and code blocks alone. The next day he said it was close to finished, though he was still looking for a better name.

Other WordPress News

• Self-hosting over services: Mullenweg urged friends to avoid LiveJournal and offered to set them up with blogs on his own server. It was an early sign of the preference for self-hosted, user-owned publishing that WordPress would later make central.
• b2 still unmaintained: There was still no word from b2’s creator, Michel Valdrighi, and b2 users kept trading fixes and hacks on the cafelog forums.

Industry Trends and Insights

Google’s purchase of Blogger showed that the biggest internet companies now saw weblogs as worth owning. For the people running b2, Movable Type and other self-hosted tools, it sharpened a question that would keep coming up: who controls your writing when it lives on someone else’s platform? An independent, GPL-licensed tool would offer one answer.

Plugin of the Month: Texturize

Texturize was not a plugin, because WordPress had no plugin system yet. It was a standalone filter, and it fixed a problem every blogger noticed: typewriter quotes and double hyphens looked crude. Merged later as wptexturize, it would ship as a headline feature of WordPress’s first release in May and is still in core today.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

A month after proposing the fork, Mullenweg was doing what he would keep doing: obsessing over the details of how text looks on the web. Texturize and autop were small pieces of code, but they showed the attention to typography and clean markup that would set WordPress apart from b2.

Looking Ahead to March 2003

Nothing was formally scheduled. Texturize was close to done, and the fork still needed a name, a home and a code repository before any public work could begin.