WordPress News Roundup February 2005: WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn” Brings Themes, Pages and Kubrick

February 2005 was the month WordPress became recognisably modern. Version 1.5, codenamed “Strayhorn”, introduced themes, Pages and a new default design, and it was downloaded more than 12,000 times within days. Many of the ideas that still define WordPress, from template files to static pages managed in the dashboard, date from this release.

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress 1.5 went out in a soft launch on Monday, February 14, while the team sorted out some infrastructure problems. It was formally announced on February 17, by which point 12,126 people had already downloaded it. The release was named after Billy Strayhorn, the composer and pianist who worked closely with Duke Ellington. That continued the habit, begun with 1.0 “Davis”, of naming major releases after jazz musicians.

• Theme system: Templates were split into files such as header, footer and sidebar, and WordPress automatically used a file like single.php for permalink pages if it existed. A whole site could be switched to a different theme with one click.
• Kubrick as default: Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick became the default theme, giving new users a polished starting point and theme authors a reference design.
• Pages: The new Pages feature let users manage static, hierarchical content such as an About page with sub-pages, which made it possible to run an entire site through WordPress.
• Comment controls: A first-time commenter was held for moderation until the site owner had approved one of their comments. A blacklist, faster bulk comment management and blocking of open proxies were also added.
• Dashboard: A new admin dashboard showed recent activity and news from the WordPress world.
• Developer primer: On February 28 the dev blog published a technical overview of 1.5 for plugin authors and hackers.

Other WordPress News

• Polyglots list: On February 14 the project launched the wp-polyglots mailing list to coordinate translations. It noted that 26 translations had existed for version 1.2.
• Upgrade party: Mullenweg hosted an upgrade party in San Francisco on February 15 for anyone who wanted help moving to 1.5.
• The Inside Scoop: Craig Hartel, known in the forums as NuclearMoose, interviewed Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Boren about 1.5 and running the project.
• The New York Times: A February 24 article on video blogging was, as far as Mullenweg knew, the paper’s first mention of WordPress.
• Kubrick everywhere: So many upgraded blogs used Kubrick that they started to look alike. Owen Winkler’s Kubrickr tool helped by turning Creative Commons photos from Flickr into custom Kubrick headers.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No security advisories were issued this month. The security story was 1.5 itself: its moderation and blacklist features were designed to stop sites that went unattended from filling up with spam.

Industry Trends and Insights

Nobody could reliably measure market share. When a widely shared chart credited WordPress with only a few thousand sites, Mullenweg disputed the method and asked for real data from crawlers such as Technorati or Feedster. Spam was a concern across the industry, and Technorati organised a Web Spam Squashing Summit. On February 18 Jesse James Garrett published his essay naming “Ajax”, which shaped how web interfaces, including the WordPress admin, would be built over the next few years.

Theme of the Month: Kubrick

Kubrick was the obvious pick. As the 1.5 default, its blue header, rounded page and clean typography quickly became the look of WordPress blogs everywhere. More importantly, it showed off the new template hierarchy, and theme authors learned the system by taking it apart.

Plugin of the Month: Image Headlines

Coldforged’s Image Headlines plugin, released in finished form on February 18, turned post titles into rendered images with smooth drop shadows. This was before web fonts, and it was a popular way for designers to escape the handful of fonts every browser shared.

Host of the Month: TextDrive

TextDrive, a host built for web publishers and known for serving the Textpattern and WordPress communities, launched another “hosting for life” offer at the end of the month. Much of WordPress.org ran on TextDrive, and by the spring the company was pledging half of the profits from WordPress-referred subscriptions back to the project.

Founder of the Month: Michael Heilemann

Danish designer Michael Heilemann, who blogged at Binary Bonsai, created Kubrick. Shipping it as the default made him one of the most visible designers in WordPress, and he later co-led K2, a more flexible successor that many theme authors built on.

Looking Ahead to March 2005

With 1.5 out, the team’s attention turned to download milestones, support for upgrading users and a better process for people testing nightly builds. Mullenweg was also heading to South by Southwest in Austin, where he was due to speak on a panel.