Pressed Words » Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg on PHP 5, WordPress Versions at Greek Blogger Camp

Austin Matzko — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:29:56 +0000

At the end of May, Matt Mullenweg spoke at the 2008 Greek Blogger Camp. Mullenweg posted some of his pictures from the camp, and you can view a video of his talk here.

I thought he mentioned a number of points of special interest to WordPress users and developers:

PHP 5: The PHP developers are discontinuing support of PHP 4 in August, and there is a movement of sorts to get PHP-based applications to force users to upgrade to PHP 5. In what Mullenweg described in the Greek talk as his most controversial blog post of the past year, he basically said that WordPress would not require PHP 5 as a minimum version for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop numerous discussions from spawning on the WordPress mailing lists about requiring the use of PHP version 5 instead of the current minimum requirement of PHP 4.3.

But here’s what new: in this talk, Mullenweg lays out the criterion for when WordPress will require PHP 5 as a minimum. Automattic monitors the PHP version of WordPress sites checking for plugin updates and using Akismet, and when the number of those using PHP 4.x drops below 10%, then WordPress will up the minimum requirement to PHP 5.
WordPress version numbers: Mullenweg offered his thoughts on the WordPress version numbering. He admitted that because of the extensive changes introduced in WordPress 2.5, it would have better been called “3.0” using the typical software version increments. But Mullenweg then complained about applications that have “version ~~infliction~~ inflation,” or excessive version increases, and said that from now on WordPress would do releases on a point-by-point basis, not according to the amount of feature change.

More significantly, he said that WordPress will no longer make releases with major changes. From now on the latest stable WordPress version will be backwards-compatible with the prior release.
Google Gears: WordPress 2.6 will have support for Gears, with the ultimate goal of allowing all data to be backed-up via Gears.

In talking about Gears, Mullenweg observed that the Flash uploader introduced in WordPress 2.5 creates numerous compatibility issues with various users’ browsers and operating systems. I thought this was particularly interesting, because Flash is usually touted as being a reliable way to make web experiences uniform. It’s good to know that sometimes proprietary software isn’t better.
Mullenweg’s blog: I thought it was interesting that Mullenweg manages his email account through a web interface he’s created that integrates with the WordPress backend. He also has expanded the WordPress taxonomy system beyond tags and categories to classify, for example, people. The latter has some possibilities for social networking development.

Matt Mullenweg on Mashable

Austin Matzko — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:36:03 +0000

Recently Mark Hopkins of Mashable interviewed WordPress founder and Automattic president Matt Mullenweg for a Mashable Conversations podcast. Most interviews of Mullenweg seem to cover the same ground, and Hopkins was even apologetic about it. However, I thought it was interesting that this time Mullenweg mentioned Mark Pilgrim’s post about switching to WordPress as being one of the events that boosted WordPress into prominence (the seminal event is the subject of Pilgrim’s entry: Movable Type’s starting a fee structure).

Sara Rosso Interviews Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Milan

Austin Matzko — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:57:03 +0000

I thought the most interesting question in this interview was Rosso’s asking Mullenweg to follow up on his comment during the WordCamp Milan Q&A about starting a WordPress “ninja” forum. During the Q&A, Mullenweg had said that he wanted the WordPress ninjas to provide free support help to other users. Here, he says that he wants to model it after the Mac store “Genius Bar.” Unfortunately, Rosso doesn’t follow up and ask how this can be implemented, and how it will be different from the existing WordPress.org support forums.

The salient difference between the “Genius Bar” and the proposed “Ninja” forum is that the “geniuses” are being paid. Almost two years ago, the WordPress hackers list discussed the issue of getting more code-savvy folks to help in the forums, and not much has changed (although there is an “advanced” section of the forums now). As some of the hackers pointed out, expert coders often find the “noise ratio” frustrating. But even assuming the signal-to-noise issue is eliminated, what will make the “ninja” forum encourage more expert help than does the current advanced forum? I’m looking forward to seeing what Mullenweg has in mind.

Interview with Matt Mullenweg

Austin Matzko — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:36:23 +0000

Phil Leigh interviews lead WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg in a short podcast. Leigh for the most part asks the usual questions: how Mullenweg got started with WordPress, Automattic’s funding, etc. However, the response to one question stood out to me: asked about the future of blogging, Mullenweg said he thought that the nature of blog “posts” would become more flexible. Leigh took this to mean that “video and audio blogging will gain significance along with podcasting,” but I think Mullenweg’s answer suggested more that he sees blogs as—and this is my terminology, not his—nodes in an distributed social network. Hopefully this will mean that Mullenweg and Automattic will support social networking projects that integrate WordPress.

Matt Mullenweg Q & A from WordCamp Milan

Austin Matzko — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:57:42 +0000

Paolo Valenti has published in a series of videos Matt Mullenweg’s question and answer session from last weekend’s WordCamp Milan. The videos are in seven parts, and you can view them all here (the last video is on the top of the page, and the first, at the bottom).

To summarize, with my comments in parentheses:
The first question asked about database abstraction in general and SQLite in particular. Mullenweg’s answer was that database abstraction in general was probably not appropriate for WordPress because it’s too slow, but SQLite might have some potential.

(Mullenweg seemed somewhat vague about how SQLite could or even whether it should be used with WordPress, but having followed past discussions among WordPress developers about porting WordPress to PostgreSQL, I think that the core developers are willing to abstract to the extent that it makes plugging in other databases possible, so long as it doesn’t cause performance to suffer.)

The second question was why the new WordPress dashboard, which debuted in version 2.5, split up so many of the menu items. Mullenweg mentioned two main reasons: 1) In an attempt to make navigation more intuitive for users, verbs appear on the left and nouns on the right. The idea is that the verb menu items are what most users want to do; the nouns (such as Settings and Plugins) are used less often and usually just by site administrators. 2) The dashboard was split up to allow plugins to put menu items in more places.

(Point 2 touches on a recent wp-hackers discussion, in which some argued that plugin options should always go under the “plugins” menu, and that this was the position of Mullenweg himself. The answer to this question seems to refute the latter notion. And the former notion is refuted implicitly for usability reasons, as some had already pointed out.)

The third question asked what WordPress was going to do to help users who aren’t technically savvy. Mullenweg had a three-pronged answer: 1) WordPress.com helps beginners get used to the WordPress interface, without actually having to set up the blog themselves. (Mullenweg made an interesting point that WP.com is geared toward users on both ends of the spectrum: beginners and those who need lots of resources, like CNN). 2) Mullenweg wants WordPress to be a “platform,” by which he seems to mean that like Firefox it should be extensible and able to upgrade itself. 3) Mullenweg said that he wants to create a WordPress ninja forum, in which WordPress experts can help each other out for free (I’m not sure how that differs from the WordPress.org support forum).

The fourth question was whether there were plans to include caching in core, to which Mullenweg replied with an emphatic “sì!” He mentioned that there are two related Google Summer of Code projects this summer and that he recommends using the WP-Super-Cache plugin.

The fifth question was whether WordPress would include a way to backup everything, to which he replied “no.” He said that it would probably not be possible for technical reasons and that it was really the job of the site’s host to provide such an option.

The final question had to do with whether WordPress would be incorporating SEO features, to which Mullenweg suggested that it was more profitable in the long run to focus on attracting human visitors rather than trying to rig Google pagerank.

Venture Capital and Automattic

Austin Matzko — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:23:23 +0000

Xconomy has an article about the birth of Automattic, the company started by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. The author has interviewed Mike Hirshland, a partner at Polaris Venture, Automattic’s main investor.

What You Won’t See in WordPress 2.5

Austin Matzko — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 02:37:55 +0000

One of the WordPress lead developers, Ryan Boren, announced today that WordPress 2.5 was going into “feature-freeze.” That means that the remaining month until 2.5’s March 10 release will be spent fixing the bugs in existing 2.5 features, not adding more.

And that’s a lot of bugs, as much of the admin redesign hasn’t yet been completed by lead developer Matt Mullenweg, who is single-handedly doing the styling redesign.

Because of the feature-freeze, here are some features you won’t be seeing in WordPress 2.5:

A general meta-data table, my proposal for providing a better way to deal with things like comment meta data and plugin info.
Localized plugin metadata. Currently, plugins’ descriptions, names, etc., cannot be translated to the user’s language. The problem doesn’t have a trivial solution, so it was pushed off for the future.
Automatic WordPress upgrades. The idea is for users to click a button in the WordPress dashboard and upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Although this didn’t make it in, automatic upgrades for themes and plugins is in 2.5 for now, with the possibility of being yanked out should it prove too buggy.
Ajaxy page rearranging. This was actually one of the 2007 WordPress Google Summer of Code projects, but like all (as far as I know) of the other SoC projects has not been implemented.
Word count. This seems to me like something that should be restricted to a plugin, but as it’s part of WordPress.com and was proposed by a core developer, it seemed destined to become a feature.
User roles overhaul. User capabilities have a number of problems (for example, you can’t easily sort a massive database of users by role). So far the proposed workarounds have their own problems.
Plugin uninstall hook. There are plugin activation and deactivation events, but no plugin uninstallation events. The idea, pushed recently by Jeffro2pt0 on WeblogToolsCollection, is something that would clear out the unused data left around by unused plugins (depending on the plugin. This can be extensive, from numerous options values—slowing down unrelated queries—to entire database tables.

New York Times Invests a Little Bit in Automattic Without Seeming to Know Why

Austin Matzko — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:51:26 +0000

The big news today is that Automattic, the company founded by Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress, has landed a whopping $29.5 million investment from several venture capital companies and the New York Times. In announcing the move today, the Times emphasized that its investment was “small” and the “smallest.” It also seemed a little unclear about what it would stand to gain from the investment.

Martin A. Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for digital operations of the Times Company, said the company hoped to improve the publishing technology at the foundation of WordPress and harness the platform’s ability to aggregate blog posts.

First, the “publishing platform” is WordPress, the open-source software—not Automattic, the company. Is the Times confusing the two? (I mentioned earlier that the Crunchies seem to make the same mistake, and even core WordPress developer Mark Jaquith complains about it today.)

Second, WordPress does have some ability to aggregate blog posts by using the MagpieRSS PHP class, but it’s not been considered an essential part of WordPress before. Not to mention that MagpieRSS itself has been abandoned for about two years and has trouble parsing some Atom feeds. So aggregation seems like an odd reason to invest in WordPress.

So what does Automattic plan to do with the extra money? The same Times article cites CEO Toni Schneider as saying that it plans to invest in “other services, including an antispam filter and an online-identity product.” It’s probably a safe guess that he means Akismet, Automattic’s cornerstone, and OpenID. TechCrunch also mentions Gravatar and BBPress. Those are all worthy projects, so I look forward to seeing how the $29.5 million gives them a boost.

Crunchies: Did WordPress.org or Automattic Win?

Austin Matzko — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:44:21 +0000

The “Crunchies,” which describes itself as an “award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year,” had its award ceremony last night. WordPress of some sort won an award, but it’s not clear which.

WordPress is the open-source blogging software hosted on WordPress.org. It’s sometimes referred to as “WordPress.org” to differentiate it from “WordPress.com,” which is a commercial site running WordPress Multi-User (MU) and owned by Automattic, the company headed by the lead WordPress developers. Because a number of the key people overlap between WordPress.org and Automattic, it’s understandable that people would confuse the two. However, Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress and founder of Automattic, often seems at pains to distinguish them.

But the folks behind the Crunchies don’t seem as aware of the distinction. On the one hand, WordPress.org put up a banner encouraging people to vote for it in the Crunchies. And Mullenweg seems to think that congratulations should go “to the entire WordPress community for this win. Just wait until they see 2.5,” that “2.5” referring to the version of WordPress.org to be released some time in the Spring. (WordPress MU, used by Automattic on WordPress.com is currently at version 1.3.)

But on the other hand, TechCrunch lists Automattic, and Giga Omni, WordPress.com, as the winner of the “most likely to succeed” category.

Clearly, though, congratulations should go to Automattic’s Toni Schneider for “best startup CEO,” which everyone agrees he won.

WordPress Publisher Blog Launches

Austin Matzko — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:08:33 +0000

Automattic, the company founded by WordPress lead developer Matt Mullenweg, has launched the “WordPress Publisher” blog.

We’ll cover features that are often overlooked, we’ll highlight plugins that extend WordPress functionality, and we’ll showcase interesting sites being built with WordPress.

From the description, it sounds like the WordPress Publisher Blog aims to be Automattic’s in-house version of Weblog Tools Collection, currently the leading source for news on WordPress plugins and themes.

Curiously, unless you look at the WordPress Publisher Blog‘s feed, you won’t know that the author of the posts (so far) is Automattic’s Raanan Bar-Cohen.