WordPress News Roundup May 2008: WordPress Turns Five as Usability Testing Begins in New York

May 2008 was a reflective month for WordPress. The project turned five on May 27, and the community celebrated with a party in San Francisco. There were no releases, but the groundwork for the next phase of the admin was being laid: the WordPress team ran usability testing sessions in New York, research that would shape the 2.7 redesign later in the year.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress-related acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in May.

WordPress Core Updates

No core versions shipped this month. WordPress 2.5.1, released in late April, remained current while developers worked on 2.6.

• Usability testing: The WordPress blog invited users in New York City to take part in usability sessions, in a post published on May 20. The findings would later help explain why the 2.5 admin was revisited so soon.
• Password integration: Matt Mullenweg pointed to a patch letting Apache’s mod_auth_mysql work with the new salted password storage introduced in 2.5.

Other WordPress News

• Fifth birthday: WordPress marked five years since its first release with a party at 111 Minna in San Francisco on May 27.
• WordCamp Italy: Mullenweg shared photos from WordCamp Italy in Milan, one of a growing number of European WordCamps.
• Health.com switches: Health.com moved from Typepad to WordPress, another publisher defecting from Six Apart’s hosted platform.
• Podcast appearance: Mullenweg appeared on WordPress Weekly, Jeff Chandler’s podcast about the WordPress community.
• Plugins as applications: StayPress, a set of plugins for property management and bookings, showed WordPress being used to build business tools.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

May passed without a WordPress security release. Administrators who had not yet applied 2.5.1, with its fix for sites allowing open registration, were still the group most at risk. The salted password storage introduced in 2.5 was also forcing some changes elsewhere, as the mod_auth_mysql patch showed: systems that had checked WordPress passwords directly needed updating to understand the new format.

Industry Trends and Insights

Five years in, WordPress had grown from a fork of b2 into the most visible open source publishing platform on the web, with a hosted service, a commercial company behind it and WordCamps across several continents. Publishers moving away from Typepad, as Health.com did this month, showed the competitive pressure WordPress was now putting on Six Apart.

The decision to run formal usability tests so soon after 2.5 was also telling. The project was starting to treat the admin experience as something to measure and improve with evidence.

Plugin of the Month: StayPress

StayPress turned WordPress into a property listing and booking system, one of several projects that spring showing how plugins could make WordPress a foundation for business applications.

Founder of the Month: Mike Little

Mike Little co-founded WordPress with Matt Mullenweg in 2003, when the two set out to continue development of the abandoned b2 blogging software. The fifth anniversary was a natural moment to remember that WordPress began as a collaboration between a developer in England and a student in Texas.

Looking Ahead to June 2008

June was expected to bring the first public beta of WordPress 2.6, with post revisions among the planned features, as the team aimed for a summer release.