WordPress News Roundup June 2004: First WordPress Meetups, the wp-hackers List and a Bug Tracker

After May’s release and the rush of new users, June 2004 was about building community infrastructure. WordPress got a public bug tracker, a mailing list for serious development talk and its first in-person Meetups. Without a release on the calendar, Ryan Boren became the month’s most active committer as work began on what would become version 1.3.

WordPress Core Updates

• Permalinks: Boren rebuilt how rewrite rules were generated, added a %category% tag for permalink structures and fixed paging links. This continued work he had begun at the end of May.
• Bugs fixed through the tracker: Fixes for an MT importer bug that mistook dashes for entry separators, and for extra slashes left in posts during upgrades, were committed with tracker numbers. Contributor jverber also fixed invalid XHTML in several admin pages.
• Upgrade safety: Boren kept a copy of a 1.2-era function so that upgrades from older versions would not cause database errors.
• Comments: Matt Mullenweg improved the comment templates and comment code.

Other WordPress News

• Bug tracker (June 10): Mullenweg set up a bug tracker at mosquito.wordpress.org. People signed up immediately, though he said it still needed work to meet WordPress’s standards.
• wp-hackers (June 15): A new public mailing list for advanced development covered core code, the plugin API and applications built on WordPress. It filled the gap between the support forums, the docs group and the IRC channel. The first big topic was the plugin API in the next version.
• Interview: Colin D. Devroe interviewed Mullenweg about WordPress and its future.
• First WordPress Meetups (June 26): The first gatherings were organised through wordpress.meetup.com in cities across the country. Mullenweg joined the San Francisco group at the Borders bookstore on Union Square after correcting a mix-up over the venue.

Industry Trends and Insights

The arrival of so many Movable Type users in May had grown the community quickly, and June’s new channels were a response. A bug tracker made problem reports trackable instead of scattered across forum threads. The hackers list gave plugin authors and core developers somewhere to talk design. The Meetups showed that a project started on blogs and IRC now had enough local users to meet in person, a precursor to the WordCamps that began in 2006.

Founder of the Month: Ryan Boren

Ryan Boren made his first direct commit in February and by June was making more commits than anyone else. He had already done the gettext work that made 1.2 translatable, and his rebuilding of the permalink and rewrite system laid the base for the flexible URLs in the next release. He would serve as one of WordPress’s lead developers for many years.

Looking Ahead to July 2004

Development of the next version continued, with discussion on wp-hackers about the plugin API. PHP 5.0, the major new version of the language WordPress is written in, was nearing its final release, and the team would need to make sure WordPress ran on it.