WordPress News Roundup November 2005: WordPress.com Opens to All as Joyent Buys TextDrive

November 2005 was the month WordPress.com opened to the public. After months of invite-only growth, anyone could sign up for a free hosted WordPress blog. Meanwhile, volunteers held the project’s first organised bug hunt on the code that would become WordPress 2.0, and the team calmed fears about a worm targeting PHP blogging software.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

TextDrive, the host that served much of WordPress.org and was popular with Textpattern and Rails developers, was acquired by Joyent, announced on November 28. Matt Mullenweg joked about “Hosting 2.0”. For WordPress it meant one of its best-known hosting partners now belonged to a larger company.

WordPress Core Updates

• The first Bug Hunt: On November 5 contributors gathered in the #wordpress-bugs IRC channel for a WordPress Bug Hunt, confirming bugs and testing patches against WordPress 1.6-ALPHA. It was meant to be the first of a regular series.
• 2.0 in its final stages: By November 21 Mullenweg described WordPress 2.0, the new name for the release developed as 1.6, as being in its final stages.
• The case against options: When Alex King proposed an “about:config” screen exposing many more settings, Mullenweg explained why WordPress avoids options. Every setting adds clutter and confuses users, so the project preferred sensible defaults, with plugins for anything else. That philosophy still shapes WordPress.

Other WordPress News

• WordPress.com opens: On November 21 Mullenweg opened WordPress.com to sign-ups without invites, saying the service was scaling well now that problems from a server move had been fixed. Red Herring covered the launch. Mullenweg said the service was being built by a small team: himself, Andy Skelton, Donncha Ó Caoimh and Ryan Boren.
• Akismet update: A Thanksgiving update to the Akismet plugin showed the full content of caught spam, which had been the main complaint about the first version.
• Blogging Enterprise: Mullenweg spoke on RSS tools at the Blogging Enterprise conference at the University of Texas in Austin on November 2.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

A worm exploiting the PHPXMLRPC library began spreading in early November, and some reports wrongly listed WordPress 1.5 as vulnerable. On November 8 the dev blog set the record straight: since 1.5, WordPress had used a different library called IXR. Only 1.2.x and older were affected. Those users were told to upgrade to 1.5.2, or at least delete the old XML-RPC class files. The team also set up a dedicated address for reporting security problems.

Industry Trends and Insights

Google released Google Analytics as a free hosted service in mid-November. Mullenweg predicted it would be adopted widely and noted that its tracking code validated as XHTML Strict. PHP 5.1 came out late in the month and Firefox 1.5 at the end of it, but most WordPress hosts were still running PHP 4.

Host of the Month: Joyent

With TextDrive, Joyent took over one of the hosts most closely associated with independent web publishers and with WordPress.org itself. The combined company went on to build cloud infrastructure, and Node.js later grew up under its stewardship.

Founder of the Month: Dean Allen

Dean Allen, the Canadian designer and writer behind Textism, created Textpattern and co-founded TextDrive. Mullenweg credited Textpattern as one of WordPress’s early inspirations. The sale to Joyent made November a good month to recognise the person behind one of WordPress’s most important early hosting homes.

Looking Ahead to December 2005

Everything pointed toward WordPress 2.0. A public release candidate was the next step, and WordPress.com, now open to everyone, would give the new version’s features a large audience.