WordPress News Roundup July 2005: WordPress.com Opens Its Waiting List

July 2005 gave the first public sign of a new part of the WordPress story. Matt Mullenweg opened a waiting list for WordPress.com, the hosted service where people could get a WordPress blog without installing anything. The rest of the month was about the community: the dev blog started carrying weekly roundups, the documentation team ran WordPress Backup Week, and Forbes.com gave WordPress an award.

WordPress Core Updates

There was no new release. Work went on toward the next major version, then called 1.6.

• Export is coming: Asked about exporting content, Mullenweg said it was the first item on the 1.6 list. It had been cut from 1.5 for time, and the hard part was exporting WordPress’s richer data, such as custom fields and post slugs, without losing anything.
• Developers meet in person: Ryan Boren, the other main developer of WordPress, visited Northern California, and he and Mullenweg met in person for the first time at a San Francisco geek dinner.

Other WordPress News

• WordPress.com waiting list: On July 26 Mullenweg invited people to sign up for notification about WordPress.com, first come, first served. He thanked Ric Johnson for releasing the domain.
• Weekly roundups: The dev blog started weekly roundup posts written by the community through the Codex. Early ones featured guides on template tags and the Loop.
• Backup Week: The forums and Codex declared July 23–30 WordPress Backup Week and urged everyone to back up their files and database, even if their host already did.
• Forbes.com Best of the Web: WordPress won Forbes.com’s Best of the Web and Favorite award for blog tools. The review said version 1.5 had put WordPress clearly ahead of its competition.
• Blog Business Summit: WordPress became a sponsor of the Blog Business Summit, held August 17–19 in San Francisco, and offered WordPress users a $300 registration discount.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

Early in July, Netcraft reported a flaw in a widely used PHP XML-RPC library that affected Drupal, Serendipity, PostNuke and other applications, under a headline about vulnerable blogging apps. Mullenweg pointed out that WordPress used a different XML-RPC library and was not affected. He noted that the same researcher had found the unrelated problem fixed in June’s 1.5.1.3. The dev blog’s first roundup reminded users to upgrade to that release.

Industry Trends and Insights

Six Apart was previewing Movable Type 3.2, and Mullenweg encouraged WordPress users to read the feature list and suggest anything worth borrowing. Measuring the blogosphere was still a problem. Mullenweg noted that the Blog Census still did not count WordPress blogs at all, while Ping-O-Matic alone had a database of more than 5.6 million blogs.

Plugin of the Month: WordPress Database Backup

Released by Skippy (Scott Merrill) on July 12, just before Backup Week, WordPress Database Backup could save a site’s database to a file or email it to the owner. Paired with the WP-Cron plugin it could run on a schedule. Mullenweg recommended it, and later in the year it was bundled with WordPress 2.0.

Founder of the Month: Lorelle VanFossen

Lorelle VanFossen was one of the leading volunteers on the documentation team. The Codex articles, the roundups and Backup Week all came from that group. Her later writing on Lorelle on WordPress made her one of the best-known WordPress educators.

Looking Ahead to August 2005

The Blog Business Summit in mid-August was the next big date, and the first WordPress.com accounts were expected to go to people on the waiting list. Development on 1.6 continued, with export at the top of the feature list.