WordPress News Roundup October 2007: Automattic Acquires Gravatar as WordPress 2.3.1 Ships

October 2007 brought Automattic’s first acquisition. On October 17 the company announced it had bought Gravatar, the globally recognised avatar service, setting a pattern of buying small web services and folding them into the WordPress world. In core, WordPress 2.3.1 cleaned up the big 2.3 release, while WordPress collected an open source award and the community gathered for WordCamp Argentina.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• Automattic acquires Gravatar: Matt Mullenweg announced the deal on October 17, describing it simply as a good fit, and the Gravatar blog followed with its own announcement on October 18. The price was not disclosed. Gravatar’s creator, Tom Preston-Werner, later wrote that the deal had been signed on September 21 and that it was the first company Automattic had acquired.
• What changed: Coverage at the time noted that Gravatar had been struggling with the classic problems of scale. Automattic moved the service onto WordPress.com’s infrastructure and soon enabled Gravatars on Mullenweg’s own blog comments.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 2.3.1 RC1 (October 24): A release candidate gave users two days to test the fixes.
• WordPress 2.3.1 (October 26): A bug-fix and security release that resolved more than twenty bugs, including tagging support for Windows Live Writer and a login problem on blogs whose blog address differed from their WordPress address.
• Toward 2.4: Work on the next release, including large changes to the admin area, began in late October, with a December release still the plan.

Other WordPress News

• WordCamp Argentina: Announced on October 19, the event drew Mullenweg to Buenos Aires, where he previewed an idea for a WordPress.com theme marketplace.
• Packt award: WordPress won Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System in Packt’s 2007 Open Source CMS Award, with Elgg and Drupal sharing second place.
• WordPress For Dummies: Mullenweg highlighted the new WordPress For Dummies book, another sign the software had gone mainstream.
• Talks and interviews: Mullenweg shared his slides on WordPress.com’s architecture from the Future of Web Apps conference in London and gave an interview to The Guardian.
• Storage: Mullenweg wrote about WordPress.com’s use of Amazon S3 for storing uploaded files and the costs involved.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

WordPress 2.3.1 was described as a bug-fix and security release, and administrators who had upgraded to 2.3 were encouraged to apply it. Thanks to 2.3’s new update notifications, many saw the prompt in their dashboards for the first time rather than hearing about it from the WordPress blog.

Industry Trends and Insights

Google’s move to penalise sites that sold links added fresh weight to the argument against sponsored themes. Mullenweg wrote about Google penalising paid links on October 25, noting what it meant for themes carrying paid footer links. The Gravatar deal, meanwhile, hinted at Automattic’s broader strategy: open, platform-agnostic services that worked on WordPress and beyond.

Plugin of the Month: Gravatar

Gravatar support in WordPress still came from plugins and theme code in 2007, and the acquisition made those integrations far more dependable. A single image tied to an email address followed commenters from one blog to the next.

Founder of the Month: Tom Preston-Werner

Tom Preston-Werner created Gravatar and sold it to Automattic this month. He would go on to co-found GitHub the following year, but in October 2007 his globally recognised avatars were becoming part of the WordPress ecosystem.

Looking Ahead to November 2007

November was expected to bring continued work on WordPress 2.4 and its admin changes, ahead of the planned December release. Mullenweg was also set to appear at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, and Gravatar users were watching to see how the service would improve under Automattic.