WordPress News Roundup October 2006: WordPress MU 1.0, bbPress 0.72 and WordPress 2.0.5 “Ronan”

October 2006 was the busiest release month of the year for the WordPress family. bbPress, the forum software behind the WordPress support forums, had its first official release. WordPress MU reached 1.0. WordPress 2.0.5 broke with tradition by being named after Ryan Boren’s newborn son. Outside WordPress, Google’s purchase of YouTube dominated the month’s tech news.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress-specific deals were announced. In the wider web, Google agreed in early October to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, the defining deal of the user-generated content era. Matt Mullenweg also noted Logitech’s acquisition of Slim Devices, maker of the Squeezebox music players.

WordPress Core Updates

• bbPress 0.72 “Bix” (October 13): The first official bbPress release came after two years of development. It offered spam protection through Akismet, tagging, RSS feeds, easy extensibility and WordPress-style customisation.
• WordPress MU 1.0 (October 23): The multi-blog version of WordPress that powered WordPress.com reached 1.0 after about a year of heavy development. The team said it was best suited to server-savvy users. The announcement also introduced bbPress to WordPress users, highlighting its full user and login integration with WordPress.
• WordPress 2.0.5 “Ronan” (October 27): The latest 2.0 release included security fixes and about 50 bug fixes, mostly around feeds, custom fields and internationalisation. It was named for Ryan Boren’s son Ronan, the first “WP baby”. The 2.0 series had passed 1.2 million downloads.
• A new committer: 2.0.5 was the first release handled by Mark Jaquith as maintainer of the 2.0 branch. He joined Mullenweg and Boren as the only people with commit access.

Other WordPress News

• Le Monde switches: The French newspaper Le Monde moved all its blogs from TypePad to WordPress.
• BlogTalk in Vienna: Mullenweg spoke at BlogTalk and posted his slides, titled “WordPress and Jazz”.
• Meetups and ideas: New York WordPress users held a meetup, and Mullenweg asked for ideas and a paid developer for a WordPress Firefox extension.
• On PayPerPost: Mullenweg criticised paid-blogging service PayPerPost. He said he had no problem with bloggers earning money, but that sponsored posts must be disclosed.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

Version 2.0.5 included security fixes, and the team credited contributors and testers including Mustlive, Peter Westwood and Robert Deaton. Mullenweg also warned about a disturbing new tactic: spammers breaking into blogs and quietly inserting CSS-hidden spam links into hundreds of existing posts instead of defacing the site, which made the compromise hard to spot and hard to clean up.

Industry Trends and Insights

The browser wars restarted, with Internet Explorer 7 released on October 18 and Firefox 2 a week later, both important for WordPress’s increasingly Ajax-heavy admin. Publishers continued to leave hosted platforms for WordPress, as Le Monde showed, while the YouTube deal confirmed that user-generated media was where the big money was going.

Founder of the Month: Mark Jaquith

Mark Jaquith had already written popular plugins, found security bugs and documented releases on his blog. Commit access and responsibility for the 2.0 branch made him the third core committer. He became one of WordPress’s longest-serving lead developers, known especially for his careful approach to security and stability.

Looking Ahead to November 2006

With the 2.0 branch in Jaquith’s hands, Mullenweg and Boren could focus on finishing 2.1. WordPress.com was growing quickly, and now that MU was public, other organisations could run their own WordPress.com-style networks.