WordPress News Roundup November 2006: WordPress.com Passes 500,000 Blogs

November 2006 was quiet on the official dev blog, with no posts and no release, but WordPress.com reached a milestone. On November 28 the hosted service passed 500,000 blogs, a little over a year after it opened to the public. Automattic added a designer whose work already defined how WordPress.org looked, and Matt Mullenweg took WordPress to Spain.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress deals were announced in November.

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress 2.0.5, released at the end of October, remained current. The developers were concentrating on getting 2.1 ready. It included major database changes that plugin authors would need to prepare for, and those changes were documented in detail in December.

Other WordPress News

• Half a million blogs: Mullenweg announced on November 28 that WordPress.com had passed 500,000 blogs.
• Matt Thomas joins Automattic: Designer Matt Thomas, who had redesigned WordPress.org a year earlier, joined Automattic full time. Mullenweg joked that the company now had twice the “Mattic”.
• Evento Blog España: Mullenweg travelled to Seville for Evento Blog España, his first visit to Spain. He gave many interviews there, including a long one with El País, and said Spain’s blogging scene was full of energy and one to watch.
• The Guardian profile: The Guardian’s weekend magazine profiled Mullenweg as part of a feature on Web 2.0.
• PC World takes notice: A PC World guide to blogging tools said top bloggers were increasingly moving to WordPress, pointing to its many plugins and widgets compared with the basic tools in Blogger, Windows Live Spaces and Yahoo 360.
• Scaling notes from MySQL Camp: After speaking at Yahoo, Mullenweg attended MySQL Camp at Google and published notes on how Google partitioned its MySQL databases, comparing it with the sharding approach WordPress.com used.
• A new ma.tt: Mullenweg relaunched his own blog with a design by Nicolò Volpato. It was his first major redesign since 2003, with related posts and photos tied to blog entries from the same day.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security advisories were published in November. Users were advised to run 2.0.5, which included October’s security fixes, while spam remained the everyday threat that Akismet and plugins like Spam Karma were handling.

Industry Trends and Insights

PHP 5.2.0 was released on November 2. It brought better performance and new extensions, though most WordPress hosts were still running PHP 4. Mullenweg also shared RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady’s argument that the biggest community wins, even over open source. The idea fit WordPress, whose plugins, themes, forums and events were becoming as important as its license. Accessibility advocate Joe Clark, meanwhile, was trying to fund an accessibility project through small community donations, an early experiment in crowdfunding open web work.

Founder of the Month: Matt Thomas

Matt Thomas designed the WordPress.org site launched alongside WordPress 2.0. Joining Automattic made him the company’s in-house designer, and over the following years he shaped WordPress.com and much of Automattic’s design work.

Looking Ahead to December 2006

WordPress 2.1 was getting close, and plugin developers needed to prepare for its database changes. With WordPress.com at half a million blogs, Automattic was also working to keep the service fast as it grew.