WordPress News Roundup May 2004: WordPress 1.2 “Mingus” Brings Plugins as Movable Type’s Licence Change Sends Bloggers Switching

May 2004 was the month WordPress broke through. On May 13, Six Apart announced new pricing and licensing for Movable Type 3.0. Many bloggers who ran the free version decided it was time to leave, and WordPress, free under the GPL and easy to import into, was the obvious place to go. Slashdot covered the exodus twice, Mark Pilgrim explained his switch in a widely read post, and the WordPress forums had to be briefly switched off to cope with the traffic.

Nine days later, the team shipped WordPress 1.2 “Mingus” with its new plugin architecture.

WordPress Core Updates

• Release candidates (May 14 and 20): The first RC arrived on May 14. A final RC on May 20 tested last-minute fixes for problems the first one had shown.
• WordPress 1.2 “Mingus” (May 22): Named for Charles Mingus, 1.2 added sub-categories of any depth, OPML import and export, automatic thumbnails, encrypted passwords and cookies, a plugin architecture that could hook into nearly every action, localisation with Unicode support, advanced comment moderation with mass editing, post previews, RSS and LiveJournal importers, multiple update-ping services, and the option to keep WordPress’s files in a different directory from the blog.
• Hello Dolly: A sample plugin, Hello Dolly, was added on release day as a guide for plugin authors.
• After 1.2: Mullenweg moved table names to $wpdb properties as groundwork for multiple blogs, and opened the rewrite rules to plugins. Valdrighi split post functions into a new functions-post.php file.

Other WordPress News

• “No plans to charge” (May 13): Responding to emails after Six Apart’s announcement, the dev blog wished Six Apart well and pointed out that the GPL guaranteed WordPress’s source would stay free.
• Slashdotted: Slashdot linked to the Movable Type controversy and the switch to WordPress on May 14 and again on May 24. The forums were briefly disabled and parts of the site made static to handle the load.
• Guides for switchers: Carthik Sharma published a step-by-step migration guide and contributed a new Movable Type importer. Gregory Auld continued a series on converting MT template tags to WordPress tags.
• Eric Meyer’s plugins: The CSS expert, who now ran his blog on WordPress, shared plugins written for the 1.2 format.
• Forums milestone: The support forums passed 30,000 posts and 2,000 registered members.
• Packages and lists: Peter Westwood created a Gentoo Linux ebuild, a Debian package was available, Ping-o-Matic’s XML-RPC endpoint went live, and a new mailing list sent a diff of every CVS commit.
• Hindi localisation: Pankaj Narula released a complete Hindi translation on May 19 using the new gettext system, just before 1.2 shipped with its first official translation template.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No advisories were published. WordPress 1.2 strengthened security by encrypting passwords in the database and in cookies, and late fixes added referrer checks when plugins were activated or deactivated.

Industry Trends and Insights

Movable Type 3.0’s licensing change is often described as the moment WordPress took off, and the evidence from the month supports that. Two waves of Slashdot traffic hit wordpress.org within ten days, and bloggers with large audiences such as Mark Pilgrim switched publicly. Pilgrim argued that software freedom, not price, was the real issue. Mullenweg wrote at the end of the month that the server had struggled under WordPress’s sudden popularity.

Plugin of the Month: Hello Dolly

Hello Dolly displays a random lyric from the song in the admin. It is tiny and deliberately trivial, written to show plugin authors how hooks work. Added as 1.2 shipped, it was one of the first plugins ever bundled with WordPress, and it is still included today.

Founder of the Month: Mark Pilgrim

Mark Pilgrim, the author of Dive Into Mark and a widely read voice on web standards, published “Freedom 0” on May 14 to explain why he was leaving Movable Type for WordPress. He argued that licence terms mattered more than price, and the post became the defining statement of the switch. It gave WordPress’s GPL licence a persuasive champion at exactly the right time.

Looking Ahead to June 2004

In “The Road Ahead,” Mullenweg laid out the next steps. A 1.3 release would bring an improved plugin API and admin and lay the foundation for full multi-blog support. A 1.2.1 bug-fix release was possible if enough issues came up. A longer-term fix for the overloaded server was also needed.