WordPress News Roundup May 2006: The Shuttle Admin Redesign Is Unveiled

May 2006 was a quiet month on the official dev blog. No posts were published there, but the WordPress world was busy. A volunteer design team unveiled Shuttle, a major redesign of the WordPress admin. Harvard’s Berkman Center moved its blog service to WordPress MU, and WordPress.com kept adding features. Late in the month a public security report set up the first 2.0 security release of the summer.

WordPress Core Updates

• Shuttle unveiled: On May 15 Khaled Abou Alfa revealed the Shuttle project, a redesign of the WordPress admin by Khaled, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J. Davis, Joshua Sigar and Bryan Veloso. Matt Mullenweg called it a significant milestone. He said its large changes would be added gradually rather than all at once, and tested on WordPress.com first to check that the team’s assumptions held up.
• 2.1 development: Work on WordPress 2.1 continued in Subversion, while WordPress 2.0.2 remained the current release.

Other WordPress News

• Harvard on WordPress MU: The Berkman Center at Harvard Law School switched its blog server to WordPress MU. Anyone with a Harvard email address could now set up a WordPress blog in seconds, an early large example of MU in higher education.
• Accounts without blogs: WordPress.com began letting people register without creating a blog, which users had been asking for.
• Akismet stats: Akismet launched a public page of spam and legitimate comment statistics. Mullenweg noted the trend was not encouraging.
• On the road: Mullenweg travelled to Ireland and Toronto, meeting WordPress users along the way.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

Near the end of May a WordPress issue was reported on the Bugtraq security mailing list. The team answered with WordPress 2.0.3 on June 1, which fixed that report and backported several security improvements from 2.1, including nonces to protect admin actions. It showed the team bringing security hardening from its development branch back to the stable 2.0 series instead of waiting for 2.1.

Industry Trends and Insights

Drupal 4.7.0 was released on May 1 after more than a year of work. It was a major update for WordPress’s most prominent open-source rival in content management. Universities, meanwhile, were choosing WordPress MU to give every student and staff member a blog, an approach many campuses would copy. On the web generally, “Web 2.0” was so hyped that Mullenweg shared a debunking of its myths. He also agreed with developer Nick Bradbury that any new Web 2.0 company that ignored spam was not worth taking seriously, a lesson Akismet had taught Automattic early. The growing Akismet statistics showed the same thing: as social software spread, so did the abuse aimed at it.

Founder of the Month: Khaled Abou Alfa

Khaled Abou Alfa, who blogged at Brokenkode, led the Shuttle effort. He brought together some of the best-known designers in the community to rethink how the WordPress dashboard should work. Shuttle’s ideas went into WordPress gradually over the following releases.

Looking Ahead to June 2006

WordPress 2.0.3, with the Bugtraq fix and the backported security enhancements, was ready to ship at the start of June. The next stages of Shuttle were expected to appear on WordPress.com first.