Category: WordPress

WordPress 3.1 was released about 36 hours ago. I always like to take a peek at the WordPress download counter when a new release drops. Already there have been 380k downloads, and they are clicking up rapidly at about 200 per minute, or 3 downloads per second!

WordPress mobile apps have been on a tear. The Android app has passed 100,000 users – and it was released just three and a half months ago. Meanwhile, the Blackberry app is getting close to 100k as well (it just passed 90k users) and the iPhone app will hit 400k users very soon (it was first released almost 2 years ago). The most encouraging trend is the increase in the number of posts published from mobile apps to WordPress sites. In the case of WordPress.com, mobile posts now make up over 10% of total posts published every day, and that number will almost certainly continue to go up.

Now that’s a WordPress fan!

There’s a nice article about Matt and WordPress in USA Today and news that WordPress.com is one of the fastest growing large web sites in the world (#3 according to TechCrunch’s analysis).

A big day today for WordPress: The eagerly awaited 2.7 release was officially released this morning and lots of people are downloading it.

Congratulations and huge thanks to the hundreds of people who have contributed to this release. It’s a milestone for WordPress with a new user interface and information architecture, and crucial new features like built-in upgrades and plug-in browsing.

I hope everyone enjoyed WordCamp as much as I did last Saturday (seems like Harry McCracken did).

At the camp, I gave a short presentation on the state of WordPress consulting. As WordPress continues to grow (doubling in downloads, pageviews, etc every few months), so does demand for paid design and development services around WordPress projects. Bottom line: we need more WP consultants! I’ve gotten several emails asking for a copy of the presentation, so here are my slides (slightly cleaned up).

#1 piece of feedback I received: the Automattic list of WordPress consultants is great, but getting very long – make it look more like the WP plugin and theme directories with tags and search so people can find consultants more easily.

Rob Howard (who runs Telligent), says on his blog:

WordPress is made available for free because investors and backers of the business are making the captial contribution to bring the consumer cost to $0.

That’s wrong and indicates a misunderstanding of the economic model that underpins a project like WordPress.

WordPress is made available for free because it is becoming increasingly obvious that a great way (the best way?) to create software is to give it away for free to drive maximum adoption and then charge for the add-on services that support that adoption in various ways.

This model has worked well for WordPress. WordPress has been thriving as an open source project that anyone can use and contribute to for free and build commercial businesses on top of if they so choose. As WordPress adoption has grown, commercial services have grown alongside it. There are now dozens if not hundreds of businesses that supply services like like WordPress hosting, spam filtering, template design, plugin development, ad serving, technical support, etc. Automattic is one of those businesses. We raised VC money two years ago ($1.1mm) and invested it to build out a number of services including the Akismet anti-spam service and the WordPress.com blog hosting service. Automattic does not require – as Rob seems to think – large infusions of VC money to stay in business. Quite the opposite, we’ve been profitable for over a year. But even if we weren’t, it would have no effect on the WordPress software itself. That’s one of the beauties of this model. Because paid commercial services like the ones provided by Automattic are separate from the free open source core software, Automattic could go out of business tomorrow and WordPress could continue on as a thriving open source project exactly as it does today, without any need for investors or backers to keep it afloat.

In the last couple of weeks, there has been significant news from two WordPress competitors. Drupal lead developer Dries Buytaert has raised VC money to start a commercial company called Acquia to support Drupal, and SixApart has released an open source version of their Movable Type software dubbed MTOS. I think both are good developments for the blogging and web publishing markets. They will make more high quality products – backed by viable companies – available to satisfy the accelerating growth and needs of these markets.

Most interestingly, this also means that three of the leading blogging/personal publishing platforms are all open source now.

I’m not sure how much the success of WordPress has influenced these two developments, but they do seem to validate the path that WordPress and Automattic have taken.

Registration for WordCamp 2007 is now open. Matt has put together a really great program this year. I’m very much looking forward to the conference and connecting with WordPress users and contributors.

Corel has released a new beta of their WordPerfect Lightning product. Lightning is a lightweight document and image management app that now supports publishing to blogs:

Our first supported blog platform is WordPress, and I think it’s a great fit. WordPress’ reputation among serious bloggers is unparalleled, but more importantly, its open SDK and strong support for images makes it easy for users to blog pretty much whatever information they’ve collected in Lightning.

As an aside, this is a good example of self-serve business development enabled by open APIs. Corel simply decided that they wanted to support WordPress and used our open APIs to do it. No business development back and forth, no contracts, no friction. They just implemented it and contacted us a couple of days ago to give us a heads up.