WordPress News Roundup February 2006: Widgets Debut on WordPress.com

February 2006 had no WordPress release and no posts on the official dev blog, but it introduced one of the most lasting ideas in WordPress: widgets. WordPress.com users could now rearrange their sidebars without touching code. Matt Mullenweg spent much of the month travelling, from an open-source CMS summit in Vancouver to The New York Times.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress deals were announced. In the wider market, Google bought Measure Map, the blog analytics service developed by Adaptive Path. It was popular with bloggers, and Kyle Neath of Warpspire cited it among his stats tools during Hemingway’s January surge. Mullenweg pointed readers to a discussion of whether blog analytics would disrupt the measurement business.

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress 2.0.1 was the current release throughout February. The developers were working on 2.1, and the widgets launched on WordPress.com were a preview of a feature that would eventually reach every WordPress site.

Other WordPress News

• Widgets on WordPress.com: On February 24 Mullenweg announced that WordPress.com had enabled editable sidebars with a starter set of widgets. A plugin for self-hosted WordPress, an API and more widgets were on the way. He said anyone who knew HTML could build one.
• 110,000 blogs: Responding to a pro-PHP essay by Harry Fuecks, Mullenweg noted how easy it had been to scale WordPress.com from one blog to 110,000 in a few months.
• The New York Times: After visiting the paper, Mullenweg reported that it ran nearly 25 WordPress blogs on both sides of its TimesSelect paywall, planned more, and was hiring someone with WordPress expertise. He also credited design director Khoi Vinh’s site as an inspiration for the new WordPress.org.
• Meeting Dean Allen: Mullenweg finally met Textpattern creator Dean Allen, whom he called one of WordPress’s original inspirations.
• Themes and traffic: Mullenweg highlighted how releasing Hemingway had multiplied traffic to Warpspire. He wondered why more professional designers were not pursuing the large and fast-growing WordPress theme audience, given what Kubrick and K2 had done for Michael Heilemann.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security advisories were issued in February. Spam remained the everyday threat, and Akismet’s growing user base was the community’s main defence against it.

Industry Trends and Insights

At the Open Source CMS Summit in Vancouver, hosted with Drupal’s developer conference, Mullenweg joined developers from rival projects and spoke on the Thursday. The question of whether there were simply too many CMSes was a live one. WordPress’s answer was a deliberately simple core, with flexibility through plugins and now widgets. That design helped it pull ahead of more complex systems with mainstream users.

Plugin of the Month: WordPress Widgets

Strictly speaking, widgets were a WordPress.com feature in February, with the plugin for self-hosted blogs following a month later. The idea was simple: sidebar features became boxes that users could drag into place, and themes only needed to declare a sidebar. It was one of the biggest changes to WordPress customisation since themes, and it became core functionality in WordPress 2.2.

Founder of the Month: Dries Buytaert

Dries Buytaert, the Belgian creator of Drupal, led the project whose community hosted the Vancouver summit where WordPress’s founder spoke. WordPress and Drupal took very different paths, one favouring simplicity for publishers and the other flexibility for developers. Both showed that open-source PHP projects could beat commercial content management software, and Buytaert went on to co-found Acquia in 2007.

Looking Ahead to March 2006

The widgets plugin for self-hosted WordPress was being prepared, and South by Southwest in Austin was coming up, with a WordPress meetup planned.