WordPress News Roundup January 2006: Toni Schneider Joins Automattic as WordPress 2.0.1 Lands

January 2006 was about consolidation after WordPress 2.0. The team listened to feedback and shipped a large bug-fix release at the end of the month. Automattic, only weeks after its public debut, hired its first senior executive from Yahoo. New high-profile publishers also continued to arrive.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No acquisitions or funding rounds were announced, but Automattic made a significant hire. On January 11 Om Malik reported that Yahoo vice president Toni Schneider was leaving to join the company. Mullenweg confirmed the news, saying the two had spent the past year discussing the idea of Automattic before it even had a name. Schneider had been CEO of Oddpost before Yahoo bought it, and he became Automattic’s CEO.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 2.0.1 (January 31): Exactly one month after the 2.0 announcement, the team released 2.0.1, closing 114 bugs. Users could now choose an upload directory and whether to sort uploads by date. Caching and permalinks were fixed for unusual server setups, XML-RPC uploads worked, imports used less memory, and WordPress ran on MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.
• Help Out: On January 19 the project split its work into sections such as development and testing, and asked volunteers to sign up on the Codex as organisers, testers or coders for a specific area.

Other WordPress News

• The Wall Street Journal: The paper launched its Law Blog on WordPress, which Mullenweg noted followed About.com and The New York Times.
• Three years old: Mike Little pointed out on January 25 that WordPress was three years old, counting from the start of the b2 fork. He and Mullenweg had met in person for the first time only weeks earlier.
• Akismet and money: When the Blog Herald asked whether WordPress should promote a commercial service, Mullenweg explained Akismet’s model. Paid tiers would keep the service sustainable, while more than 99.9 percent of users would never pay.
• A theme competition for 2.0: A new WordPress 2.0 theme competition offered sizeable prizes, and Mullenweg suggested that entries using 2.0’s new functions, like Binary Moon’s Regulus, should get credit for it.
• WordPress.com growth: Mullenweg said WordPress.com was adding more than a thousand blogs a day.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

There were no WordPress advisories this month. LiveJournal suffered an account-hijacking attack that used cross-site scripting through Firefox’s CSS “-moz-binding” feature. Mullenweg followed it closely, noting that WordPress.com did not allow template editing or embedded JavaScript and styles, but that new XSS techniques needed constant attention.

Industry Trends and Insights

Mainstream publishers adopting WordPress, from About.com to The Wall Street Journal, was changing how the software was seen. It was no longer just a hobbyist tool but a credible publishing platform. Hosted services were also growing: WordPress.com’s steady sign-ups put it in direct competition with Blogger and TypePad.

Theme of the Month: Hemingway

Kyle Neath released his WordPress port of Hemingway on his blog Warpspire in January. Its dark, minimal design made it an instant hit. It was downloaded around 1,500 times during January and added to WordPress.com, where Neath estimated about 1,000 people were already using it by the end of the month.

Founder of the Month: Toni Schneider

Toni Schneider brought experience as a startup CEO and from Yahoo’s developer network to a company that until then had been mostly engineers. As Automattic’s CEO through 2014, he guided its early funding, the growth of WordPress.com and its business model, and he returned as interim CEO in 2024.

Looking Ahead to February 2006

Schneider was due to start at Automattic once he left Yahoo. Development on the next major version, 2.1, was continuing in Subversion, and WordPress.com was working on new features to keep up with its growth.