WordPress News Roundup January 2009: WordPress.tv Launches as the Plugin Directory Passes 4,000

January 2009 was a month of settling in. WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” had shipped on December 10, 2008, with its redesigned dashboard, one-click core upgrades and a plugin installer built straight into the admin, and the community spent the new year getting used to a very different WordPress. There was no new core release, but the project used the breathing room to launch a new learning resource and to celebrate the people writing plugins.

The headline moments were the debut of WordPress.tv on January 17 and the plugin directory crossing 4,000 listings later in the month. Around them, WordPress MU caught up with 2.7, BuddyPress moved closer to a 1.0 release, and one of the best-known SEO plugins hit a seven-figure download count.

WordPress Core Updates

No new version of WordPress shipped in January. Version 2.7 remained the current release, and development attention was split between collecting bug reports for a first maintenance release and early thinking about what 2.8 should contain.

• WordPress 2.7 adoption: The December release was the first to let site owners upgrade WordPress itself from inside the dashboard, which made January the first month many users tried an in-place core upgrade.
• Plugin directory inside the admin: WordPress.org noted that its plugin directory was now embedded in 2.7, so users could search for and install plugins without leaving their site.
• WordPress MU 2.7: The multi-user edition, used for networks of blogs, released its 2.7 version on January 28, largely a code sync with the single-site release plus bug fixes.
• Toward 2.7.1: Tickets were being gathered for the first point release of the 2.7 branch, which arrived the following month.

Other WordPress News

The community side of the project was busy, with a new video site, a day set aside to thank developers, and steady progress on WordPress’s social networking companion.

• WordPress.tv launches: On January 17 the project introduced WordPress.tv, a home for video tutorials covering both self-hosted WordPress and WordPress.com. The launch focused on the basics and invited users to suggest what should come next. Automattic’s Michael Pick, who worked on the site, talked about it on the WordPress Weekly podcast later in the month.
• Thank a Plugin Developer Day: On January 28 WordPress.org asked users to thank the authors of the plugins they rely on, noting that the average WordPress blog ran around five plugins and that the directory had just passed 4,000 entries.
• BuddyPress 1.0 Beta 2: Andy Peatling’s social networking plugin suite for WordPress MU reached a second beta at the end of the month, with a long list of fixes and a call for testers.
• Matt Mullenweg in USA Today: WordPress’s co-founder sat down with USA Today for an interview covering the project’s history and the founding of Automattic, a sign of how far WordPress had moved into the mainstream.
• Plugin housekeeping: The popular CForms II form plugin was removed from the WordPress.org repository during the month, a reminder that the directory was starting to enforce its rules more actively.
• Podcasts multiply: A new show, PluginsPodcast, launched with a plan to review one plugin per week, joining WordPress Weekly and The WordPress Podcast in a growing audio scene.

Industry Trends and Insights

The broader story in early 2009 was WordPress becoming easier to run without technical help. Built-in upgrades and plugin installs in 2.7 lowered the barrier for small publishers, and the rapid growth of the plugin directory showed how much of WordPress’s value was now coming from third-party developers rather than core alone.

• Feed infrastructure shifts: Google was moving FeedBurner accounts onto its own systems, and WordPress users relying on the FeedSmith plugin were warned to update their settings so readers would not end up subscribed to the wrong feed.
• Video as documentation: WordPress.tv reflected a wider move toward screencasts as the preferred way to teach software to non-developers.
• Plugins as the ecosystem’s engine: Crossing 4,000 plugins confirmed that WordPress’s extensibility, not just its editor, was the main reason people were choosing it over other blogging tools.

Theme of the Month: Prologue

Automattic’s Prologue theme turned a WordPress blog into a Twitter-style group status board, with posting straight from the front page. Automattic used it internally to keep a distributed team in sync, and in January 2009 it was the clearest example of WordPress being bent into something other than a blog. Within weeks it would be reworked and relaunched as P2.

Plugin of the Month: All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack passed one million downloads in late January, and its maintainer Michael Torbert received congratulations across the community. For many site owners it was the first plugin installed on a new blog, handling title tags, meta descriptions and canonical settings that WordPress did not yet manage on its own.

Host of the Month: Bluehost

Utah-based Bluehost was one of the hosts WordPress.org recommended to newcomers, and its low-cost shared plans with one-click installs made it a common starting point for first-time bloggers. With 2.7 promising upgrades from the dashboard, a host that handled file permissions sensibly mattered more than ever.

Founder of the Month: Jeff Chandler

Jeff Chandler’s WordPress Weekly podcast and WP Tavern site were becoming the community’s unofficial newsroom. In January alone he interviewed Michael Pick about WordPress.tv, said goodbye to co-host Keith Murray, and started a weekly “Friday Happy Hour” news roundup. His independent, fan-run coverage would shape how the community talked about itself for years.

Looking Ahead to February 2009

February was expected to bring WordPress 2.7.1, the first maintenance release for Coltrane. On the events calendar, WordCamp Germany and WordCamp Denver were both scheduled, with the Denver event planning a live stream for remote viewers. BuddyPress testers were also waiting to see how quickly the project could move from beta to a release candidate.