WordPress

P2: The New Prologue

Since we are very distributed company here at Automattic, we use lots of online collaboration tools including IRC, Skype, blogs, and wikis.  The other big thing we’ve been using internally is a WordPress theme called Prologue that we developed last year.

Prologue is essentially a group twitter theme, and we’ve been hard at work updating it ( we are calling the new version P2 ) to include ajax updates, growl-like notifications, threaded comments, and a few other really clever features.  It also looks great on the iPhone !

It’s available right now on WordPress.com, and will be available for self-hosted WordPress within a week or so.   Definitely worth checking out.

Relaunch Your Site on WordPress ?

That would be the case for TheStreet.com if Howard Lindzon’s plan is executed 🙂

The company has $80 million in cash and no debt and a shitpile of traffic. It just has a useless model for 2009 and the market is screaming so.

I have people I like that work there and don’t mean to step on toes, but I have a plan.

1. Fire everyone save Cramer, Doug Kass and few of the successful Newsletter writers. It’s not about job performance, it’s about reality. Start with the Board. The Board should be ashamed and should have quit already.

2. Shutter New York. Just sneak out in the middle of the night. Phoenix is nice. Lot’s of empty buildings.

3. Relaunch TheStreet.com on WordPress and just nuke the piece of shit software and site they have going right now (Obviously this has to be ready to go before all the head count poleaxing).

[ emphasis mine ]

Read more of howard’s thoughts on howardlindzon.com.

What’s interesting about Howard’s advise is that we are seeing and hearing about lots of sites switching to WordPress now as their full CMS — a trend that is really picking up momentum in the last 6 months.  With features such as revision control, full user management, page support, and the thriving plugin eco-system it’s making a ton of sense to use WordPress for full sites now.

WordCamp San Francisco 2009

After chatting with a few people this week, I realized that not everyone knows that we announced the details for WordCamp San Francisco 2009.  It will be held on Saturday May 30th, 2009 at the Mission Bay Conference Center, and you can signup now.

It’s going to be a great event this year with outstanding speakers already lined up including Matt Cutts, Tim Ferriss, Steve Souders, Tara Hunt, and other fabulous folks.

We are also coordianting sponsors for this event.  If you are interested you can contact me directly or drop us a note here.

Hope to see you all at the event in just a few short months.

USA Today: WordPress creator Mullenweg is many bloggers’ best friend

Great Interview with Matt today in the USA Today:

WordPress has become so entrenched on the Web that many of the biggest names use it now — a roster that includes CNN, Fox News and The New York Times, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Coca-Cola and General Electric, along with millions of ordinary bloggers.

“People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they’ll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users,” says Mullenweg, 25.

I especially like the comment made by Dermot over at CNN.com:

CNN runs 30 blogs, and they’re all created the same way the general consumer does it: Programmers go to WordPress.com, sign up and create.

CNN programmers tweak the basic templates afterward to CNN’s needs, so that a CNN blog looks nothing like, say, a blog from Time magazine or Fox News. “It looks like a website that would have taken six to nine months to create, but it’s a blog we made in just a few hours,” says Dermot Waters, a senior producer for CNN.

Here is a short video interview as well:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The full article is here.

WordPress.tv

Exciting to see this go live as I’ve been watching the progress on this for a bit.  WordPress.tv is “a new addition to the WordPress family focused on making it easy for people to both learn how to use WordPress (in its dot-com and dot-org flavours), and check out the presentations at the WordCamps sprouting up all over the globe”

Error
This video doesn’t exist

Check it out on http://wordpress.tv and read the full details over on Michael Pick’s blog.

The Argument *For* Software as a Service

Josh Catone of sitepoint.com wrote a really interesting post the other day titled  “The Argument Against Software as a Service“.  I left a comment, but I didn’t register and looks like my comment might be stuck in some moderation queue, so figured I’d blog my response here just in case.

Josh makes the larger argument that hosted/SaaS services could potentially go out of business creating a crisis for those who use it:

The more you rely on third parties to get your work done, the more difficult it becomes to stay afloat if those you rely on run into trouble. SaaS applications have allowed business owners to gain access to high quality software at lower prices and with a high level of convenience, but at what potential risk?

If all your customer and sales lead information is in Salesforce.com, what happens if Salesforce.com goes under? That might create a mess that’s harder to clean up than if your CRM data was stored locally, for example. Using Google Docs might save you a bundle on site licenses for Office, but if all your internal documentation is online, what happens if Google decides Docs isn’t worth it and axes the product line? It’s something to consider, certainly.

I agree that this is a concern.  But I believe that the really important question people should ask when selecting hosted services / SaaS is “can I extract/sync with my own data  and can run my own Open Source version of this service ?”

If the answer is “yes” than the risk is entirely mitigated, and the upside is huge.

A few quick comments below on how we answer “yes” to these questions at WordPress.com, and why the hosted/SaaS model does make sense for many individuals and businesses.

On WordPress.com users can always:

1) Extract a complete set of their data via a full XML export.  We don’t do anything to lock-in our customers.  It’s their data period – and it should be a 1-click process to get a complete copy of all the posts, comments, pages, etc.
2) Sync their data. WordPress.com provides a full XMLRPC API to sync all data, and many users take advantage of 3rd party tools, especially on the desktop client side, to manage their WordPress from outside of WordPress, creating a complete duplicate set of data on their local machine.
3) Run their own self-hosted WordPress locally or on a 3rd party host and easily import all their content & themes from WordPress.com.  Users can simply head-over to WordPress.org to download the software, or select to install WordPress with nearly any hosting provider.  This works the other way too – self-hosted WordPress sites can easily be imported into WordPress.com .
4) Ensure link/SEO continuity by mapping their domain on WordPress.com (i.e. domain.com) so if they ever leave our service all the google indexing and links will continue to work.

And as importantly, since WordPress.com is built with WordPress, an Open Source project, there is security and comfort in knowing that a huge community,  numbering in the tens of thousands,  is involved with WordPress.  And even if our company and WordPress.com would somehow fails to live up to our users’ needs, the WordPress project will continue to thrive.

WordCamp Israel

Good morning from Tel-Aviv !

I’ll be attending WordCamp Israel in a couple of hours and giving a quick presentation as well. I’ll update this post later in the day with the slides and hopefully some video footage too.

update: Great seeing everyone and hope my presentation was helpful.  We don’t have the video yet, but below is the Keynote/PPT using Slideshare.  I also generally go more visual on the slides with a photo and just a word or two, but knowing that I was going to embed it, I made it a bit more verbose.

( Download PDF version of the presentation & a cool visual representation of the presentation by dibau naum h on flickr plus the WordCamp Israel 2008 flickr pool )

Also a few things people at WC Tel Aviv didn’t seem to know about that are helpful:

Thanks to Tal, Noa, Elad Salomons, and Itai Nathaniel and all the organizers and volunteers for a great WordCamp.

WordCamp Israel 2008

WordCamp Israel will be held this year on November 16th, 2008 (english language link).

Already 250+ people have registered and looks like it will be a great event. I plan on attending and helping out where I can.

The focus this year is:

…to discuss the usage of WordPress as a tool for social change and community involvement, and to strengthen the connection between the WordPress community and non-profits.

Additional goals of the conference:

  • To strengthen the ties between Israeli WordPress users
  • To grow the Israeli WordPress community
  • To increase people’s technical understanding of WordPress

As many of you know, these kinds of events are only possible with the hard work of volunteers and the generosity of sponsors. If you are interested in either drop a note to info@wordcamp.co.il.

[ WordCamp Israel ]

PollDaddy

Exciting news – PollDaddy has joined the Automattic team.

The timing is great since the Automattic team is in the mountains of Colorado at our bi-annual company meetup, and we’ve all been able to get the know the talented PollDaddy team of Lenny and Eoin.

From my earlier days at TIME.com I’ve known that polls were huge and that readers loved particiapting.  This has been echoed in the WordPress world with very popular WordPress plugins for polls.  I’m including my quick poll here:

As Matt mentioned in his blog post, in terms of integration, “we just enabled PollDaddy with 4.4 million blogs on WordPress.com and have also released the first version of their .org plugin.”

Check out the screencast below for how to add a poll on WordPress.com: