WordPress News Roundup January 2005: WordPress Launches Its Plugin Repository as 1.5 Nears

WordPress began 2005 as the blogging tool everyone seemed to be switching to, and January gave the project both a trophy and some infrastructure. Ars Technica named WordPress its Web Application of the Year, and the team opened a shared home for the growing pile of plugins and themes that people were building around the software.

Behind the scenes, nearly all the energy went into WordPress 1.5, the release that would introduce themes and Pages. Comment spam was the other big story, and this month the search engines stepped in.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress deals were announced, but the wider blogging market saw a big one. Six Apart, maker of Movable Type and TypePad, confirmed early in the month that it had acquired LiveJournal. Matt Mullenweg noted the promise that LiveJournal’s open-source code would stay open. The deal made Six Apart the dominant commercial blogging company just as WordPress was gaining ground as the free alternative.

WordPress Core Updates

There was no new release in January. Version 1.2.2 was still the current download, and the developers were finishing 1.5.

• 1.5 in testing: Mullenweg said he had switched off every anti-spam plugin on his own blog and was relying only on the new defences built into the 1.5 code, with good results so far.
• Subversion ahead: The plugin repository announcement confirmed that WordPress itself would move to Subversion for source control after 1.5 shipped.

Other WordPress News

• wp-plugins.org launches: On January 10 the project announced wp-plugins.org, a free hosting service for plugin and theme developers. It ran on Trac and Subversion, so each project got version control, an issue tracker and a wiki. Users could browse and download everything from one place.
• How many plugins? Carthik Sharma estimated there were at least 400 WordPress plugins in the wild. Mullenweg reckoned about 15 percent of them were already in the new repository.
• Web Application of the Year: Ars Technica gave WordPress the title, calling it the most prominent rising star in weblog software and praising how quickly its community dealt with comment spam.
• Bloggies season: Nominations opened for the 2005 Bloggies, and Mullenweg encouraged readers to nominate in the “Best Application for Weblogs” category.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security advisories were issued in January. The threat that occupied bloggers was spam: comment spam, trackback spam and spammers using blogs to boost their search rankings. On January 18 Google introduced the nofollow link attribute, backed by Yahoo, MSN and Six Apart. Links marked with it would no longer pass ranking credit, so spam left in comment sections would be worth less to the people posting it. WordPress was among the first publishing tools named as adopting it. Many people doubted it would stop spam, and spammers kept posting anyway, but nofollow became a permanent part of how blog comments work.

Industry Trends and Insights

Blogging had gone mainstream after the 2004 US election, and January showed the platform race taking shape. Six Apart now owned Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal. Blogger had been with Google since 2003. WordPress had no company behind it, but its user base was growing fast, and its community supplied the plugins, templates and support forums that commercial tools paid staff to provide.

Plugin of the Month: Spam Karma

Spam Karma, by the developer known as Dr Dave, was one of the most talked-about answers to comment spam. It scored each incoming comment against a series of tests and quietly handled the worst ones, without asking readers to solve a CAPTCHA. Its first public alpha had appeared on the WordPress hackers list in November 2004, and the later Spam Karma 2 stayed a favourite for years.

Founder of the Month: Mike Little

In January 2003 Mike Little answered Matt Mullenweg’s blog post about forking the abandoned b2 software, and the two began working on what became WordPress. Two years later the project was close to its most important release yet. Little’s early commitment is why he is counted as WordPress’s co-founder, and he stayed involved in the community long afterwards.

Looking Ahead to February 2005

Everything pointed to WordPress 1.5. The new theme system, Pages and stronger comment moderation had been in testing for months, and the team was preparing launch-day documentation and upgrade guides for users coming from 1.2.