WordPress News Roundup January 2008: Automattic Raises Series B as WordPress Skips 2.4 for 2.5

January 2008 set the direction for the year. On January 2, Matt Mullenweg told developers that the planned December release would be treated as skipped, with the next version, now WordPress 2.5, due in early March. Three weeks later Automattic announced a Series B round that brought The New York Times Company in alongside its existing investors. In between, WordPress and Automattic’s CEO picked up awards at the Crunchies.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• Automattic’s Series B: In “Act Two” on January 22, Mullenweg announced a new funding round. The New York Times Company joined existing investors Polaris Ventures, True Ventures and Radar, and press coverage put the round at $29.5 million. Mullenweg said the money would help Automattic expand beyond blogging into areas such as anti-spam, identity, wikis and forums, and that he had chosen to keep the company independent rather than sell.
• The numbers behind it: Mullenweg reported that WordPress.com added 1.8 million users and 25 million posts in 2007, and that WordPress.org had seen about 3.85 million downloads in the previous year.

WordPress Core Updates

• 2.4 skipped: On the wp-hackers mailing list on January 2, Mullenweg said the next release would move to early March because of big changes in the codebase and admin area. The December release, originally 2.4, would be considered skipped, and the next version would be numbered 2.5.
• No releases: No new versions shipped in January. WordPress 2.3.2, released on December 29, remained current.
• Teasing 2.5: Mullenweg used his Crunchies post to hint at what was coming in the next release.

Other WordPress News

• Crunchies wins: At the Crunchies on January 18, WordPress won “Most Likely to Succeed” and Toni Schneider was named Best Startup CEO.
• 3GB for every blog: WordPress.com raised its free upload allowance to three gigabytes per blog.
• Prologue: Automattic released Prologue, a theme for posting short status updates within small groups.
• Technorati Top 100: A survey of Technorati’s 100 most popular blogs found WordPress was the most-used platform among them.
• New adopters: British Airways’ OpenSkies blog and New York Yankees pitcher Phil Hughes both turned up on WordPress, and a Utah WordPress meetup was organised.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security releases were issued in January. The priority for administrators was finishing their rollout of 2.3.2, which had fixed the draft exposure bug just before the new year.

Industry Trends and Insights

The open source stack under WordPress changed hands this month when Sun Microsystems agreed to acquire MySQL. Mullenweg followed the story on his blog, including a comment from MySQL’s CEO. Competition among open source content management systems also heated up as Joomla released its long-awaited version 1.5.

The Series B, with a major newspaper publisher on the cap table, signalled that WordPress was being taken seriously by traditional media at a time when many outlets were rethinking how they published online.

Theme of the Month: Prologue

Prologue turned WordPress into a Twitter-style status board for teams. It was an early example of WordPress being used for internal communication rather than public blogging, an idea Automattic would later build on with its P2 theme.

Host of the Month: WordPress.com

Three gigabytes of free storage per blog was generous for the time, and it arrived as WordPress.com was serving billions of pageviews a year. The new funding gave the service room to keep growing.

Founder of the Month: Toni Schneider

Automattic’s CEO, who had co-founded Oddpost before joining the company, was named Best Startup CEO at the Crunchies and helped close the Series B in the same week.

Looking Ahead to February 2008

February was expected to bring more of the WordPress 2.5 redesign into public view ahead of its early-March target. Further out, WordCamp Dallas was on the calendar for the end of March.