WordPress News Roundup March 2005: WordPress 1.5 Races Past 100,000 Downloads

March 2005 was a victory lap for WordPress 1.5. The Strayhorn release passed 50,000 downloads in its first two weeks and was approaching 100,000 by the third week of March, which called for a party in San Francisco. The month ended badly, though. In the last days of March, bloggers found that WordPress.org had been hosting hidden pages for an advertising deal, and the fallout carried into April.

WordPress Core Updates

There were no new releases, but the team changed how pre-release code was distributed after the 1.5 launch exposed a problem.

• 50,000 in two weeks: On March 1 the dev blog thanked users for passing 50,000 downloads of 1.5 in its first fortnight.
• wp-testers list: Many impatient users had run nightly builds on their live blogs and then turned to the support forums when things broke. On March 6 the project created a wp-testers mailing list that people joined to get nightly builds, and it said nightlies would not be supported in the forums.
• WYSIWYG experiments: Matt Mullenweg posted a first-pass WYSIWYG plugin built on widgEditor and put it in the plugin repository for feedback. Visual editing would not reach core until version 2.0.

Other WordPress News

• The 100,000 party: Scott Beale of Laughing Squid arranged for the Odeon Bar in San Francisco’s Mission district to host a WordPress 100,000 party on March 22, open to anyone.
• South by Southwest: Mullenweg went back to Austin for SxSW, this time as a panellist. He estimated that WordPress had about 40 times as many users as it had a year earlier.
• Theme competition: Alex King’s WordPress theme competition, which drew designers to the new 1.5 theme system, announced its winners on March 31.
• The hidden articles controversy: On March 30 and 31, bloggers led by Andy Baio reported that WordPress.org was hosting a large set of keyword-stuffed articles. They were linked from the homepage with links hidden by CSS, as part of a paid arrangement with a company called Hot Nacho. The pages were taken down within days, and Mullenweg’s public response and apology came in early April.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security releases were needed in March. The hidden-articles episode was a matter of trust, not code, but critics said it was the same kind of search-engine manipulation that comment spammers practised, which made it more damaging for a project that had been leading the fight against spam.

Industry Trends and Insights

The big deal of the month was Yahoo’s acquisition of the photo-sharing site Flickr. It confirmed that large portals saw community-driven publishing as worth buying, following Google’s purchase of Blogger and Six Apart’s purchase of LiveJournal. For WordPress, the takeaway was that self-hosted, open-source software was competing with services backed by the biggest companies on the web, and was keeping up.

Host of the Month: Laughing Squid

Laughing Squid was an independent San Francisco host run by Scott Beale, and it was closely tied to the local blogging and arts scene. Beale organising the 100,000 party was typical of the company’s role in the community, and Laughing Squid was soon listed among the hosts recommended on WordPress.org.

Founder of the Month: Alex King

Alex King, a Denver developer, was one of the most prolific early WordPress plugin authors. His theme competition gave designers a reason to learn the 1.5 template system and helped fill the theme galleries that new users browsed. King went on to found Crowd Favorite and stayed one of the community’s most respected voices until his death in 2015.

Looking Ahead to April 2005

April would begin with the hidden-articles fallout and Mullenweg’s explanation. Beyond that, the team was preparing a hosting recommendations page for WordPress.org and starting work on the first maintenance release of the 1.5 branch.