Wordpress 2.5 Mar 29 2008
I began my ‘blogging’ career in January 2004 with Typepad, and almost immediately a fresh install of Movable Type. For me MT was, and still is and pain in the proverbial backside. It lacked, what I later found out to be a simpler CMS in Wordpress.
So, hot on the heals of a decent blog CMS, I came across the in-famous Wordpress platform. Love at first sight lets say.
In 2004, August if memory serves me well, on a warm summers day in Houston, Texas, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Matt Mullenweg for a Chinese at The Galleria Mall downtown.
Matt and I share common friends, so I reached out to Matt and we discussed Wordpress among other things.
(IM and phone is not my communication tool of choice. Meetings face-to-face are golden to building relationships)
Matt is someone a lot of people respect and admire, me included, so this lunch was a moment to remember. At that time, and still I find him to be a quiet, down-to-earth, talented individual, who had the eyes and brains to make Wordpress a success.
Today, we see the launch of Wordpress 2.5, and for me that time has come. The tipping point for Matt, and especially the community. With Matt’s vision and that of the community, Wordpress has grown, and will continue to grow into a world-class CMS.
“WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.”
And this is just the Wordpress self-hosted CMS - community driven, and open source.
Automattic, the creators of Wordpress.com is another story. Automattic recently closed its Series B round of funding for $29.5m. Wordpress.com is their free blog hosting service with close to 2.5m blogs and growing. With premium users such as CNN, the GigaOM Network, Fortune and Fox, Automattic must be doing something right.
I expect to see more from Matt, Automattic and the Wordpress community as times goes on, but for now, Wordpress 2.5 is my blog CMS of choice, and I am damn happy with it. Congratulations to all involved.
update: I will post a review of 2.5 shortly
technorati tags: wordpress, wordpress2.5, automattic, mattmullenweg