WordPress News Roundup September 2006: WordPress.com VIP Goes Public as Automattic Hires

September 2006 had no WordPress release, but it was a busy month for the company and services around the software. WordPress.com opened its VIP hosting program to the public, Automattic hired two well-known community figures, and WordPress picked up a significant mainstream accolade.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No acquisitions or funding rounds were announced. Automattic’s growth this month came through hiring and infrastructure. Matt Mullenweg publicly asked for quotes on 22 servers for a third data centre for WordPress.com and related services.

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress 2.0.4 remained current throughout September. Development of 2.1 continued, and related projects were coming together: bbPress, the lightweight forum software from the WordPress team, got simpler integration with WordPress, which Mullenweg said was getting really cool.

Other WordPress News

• WordPress.com VIP: On September 25 the WordPress.com VIP program went public, offering hosting on WordPress.com’s infrastructure for high-profile and high-traffic sites. It was the start of what became Automattic’s enterprise business.
• Mike Adams joins Automattic: Michael Adams, known as mdawaffe and a key developer of bbPress, joined Automattic early in the month.
• Lloyd Budd joins: Lloyd Budd, previously at Flock and in the Mozilla community, joined Automattic full time on September 19.
• WebWorkerDaily: Om Malik launched a new blog, WebWorkerDaily, which Mullenweg said was hosted on WordPress.com as part of a program about to go public, the VIP program announced later in the month.
• Lenovo blogs on WordPress: ThinkPad maker Lenovo was publishing its company blogs on WordPress, another big-brand adopter.
• WordPress in print: A new Japanese WordPress book appeared, and Mullenweg noted that the WordPress 2 Visual QuickStart Guide was on sale in most Apple stores.
• BusinessWeek’s best: BusinessWeek named WordPress the top blogging tool in its best-of-2006 rankings.
• Future of Web Apps: Mullenweg presented at Carson Workshops’ Future of Web Apps summit and published his slides afterwards.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security releases were issued in September. The bigger problem was spam blogs, or splogs. Mullenweg was quoted in a Wired feature on the subject and disagreed with a suggestion in it that the web needed a global identity system to beat spam, arguing that Akismet showed spam could be stopped without making commenters jump through hoops. He also praised TypePad’s support team for removing them quickly, a rare compliment to a competitor and a reminder that hosted services had to police abuse on their own platforms.

Industry Trends and Insights

VIP hosting showed where the market was heading. Media companies wanted WordPress without running servers, and Automattic could offer the same infrastructure that served WordPress.com. Splogs and comment spam, meanwhile, were turning anti-abuse work into a competitive advantage, which made Akismet more central to Automattic’s offering.

Founder of the Month: Mike Adams

Michael Adams had become one of the most active contributors to WordPress and bbPress, and he blogged as mdawaffe at Blogwaffe. He went on to a long career at Automattic and kept contributing to the core codebase. His joining showed the company’s habit of hiring from among its most active contributors.

Looking Ahead to October 2006

The bbPress and WordPress MU teams were working toward their first official releases, and work on 2.1 continued alongside 2.0 maintenance. Mullenweg was also heading to the BlogTalk conference in Vienna.