I'm at Wordcamp NYC at Sun Microsystems on this Sunday with a packed room of people, all devoted to WordPress as a blogging platform.
First up @dingman who organized Wordcamp today and then Hal Stern, VP at Sun, followed by Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress to speak about The State of WordPress.
Preview of what has been done and what is upcoming with 2.7 in November and what is going to be released sometime in the future.
The coding is up to 90 people with 3 reviewers, typically. The metrics are the size of WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org plus downloads per month.
Spam is the biggest problem and they have figured out the motivations of bloggers "Great Post....." and you need to check the URLs from these false positives.
Most of the WordCamps are organized by locals, except the one San Francisco, and represent the character of the local community and ranged from 50 attendees to 350 attendees on the high end.
Versions 2.3, 2.5 released this year and Google Gears which speeds up performance and the IPhone Application for the IPhone, which I am using right now.
The Iphone app will have comment moderation and Stats (if you use standard stats package).
Theme Directory is monitored carefully and Plugin installs will be much easier with upcoming 2.7 which will have a built in installer application. The same thing could be done with Themes, but haven't been done yet.
6 Million WordPress.org blogs in existence now.
Intelligent Tails - Plugins (free market of "features"); plugins such as OpenID and AdSense Manager are a possible indication of what WordPress should adopt in the future, via Web Standards.
Intact, WP-Polls is good because those who take a poll are far more likely to leave a comment, and leaving comments to unique ip addresses are a signol for "Engagement" and posts that have comments are more likely to be ranked well.
With an average of 5 plugins per blog, everyone could be said to be running a different version of WordPress.
Uttimate Seo Plugin, we are looking at packages of like this, and the evolution of an application.
But what happens if a blog runs a 1000 plugins with 800 active, aren't there bound to be conflicts?
WordPress 2.7, upcoming in November, will have some these features. We learned a lot from the 2.5 update and used the CrazyHorse blog and EyeTracker Software.
One thing to do, with CrazyHorse, which was a Bizzaro version of WordPress, for A/B testing.
Quick and Bulk Edit features being added, direct reply to comments with a parent/child relationship, perhaps to reply tocomments by email.
Also, a lot of interface improvements that add more flexability.
Installing Plugins directly and installing instead of downloading manually, will be available with 2.7.
We don't think existing PlugIns or Themes will be broken in 2.7 and that's one reason we test new releases of WordPress with popular plugins and themes.
The overall perception is everything you do on 2.5 will be faster in 2.7.
Matt wants to make it easier to add web services like Google Maps embed, with a button, like videos, photos are now, for example.
Greater Intergration with existing site services including user authentication, and, clearly, a lot of creativity can be applied, that often, aren't.
Matt mentioned that when he was in China, in response to a question, when a searcher does a search that is not approved, their Internet service was dropped for any where between 5 minutes and several days.
He mentioned the Chinese Milk story was in the news and blogs one day, and gone the next (frightening)!
WordPress is now a platform.
Themes for 2009
Security ( a lot of US Governent agencies use it), discover and fix problems.
Rich Media (do a better job with audio and video).
Working with The Cloud (Google, Amazon, etc).
Multi-Modal (if your doing a video, why not just put YouTube instead of WordPress). Matt thinks people are going to care more about where they put their data (Twitter for staying in touch with friends) and uses and build on "Network Effects".
BuddyPress, a social network on WordPress on one side and "Dissel"? Which is a the idea if editing your social graph in one place than having a zillion social networks to maintain. Eventually, we want to tie all the pieces together, but right now wears justgetting started.
Tattoos and Design (wordpress logo on shirt and on your forehead?)
Year of Themes, and Themes can incorporate Plugins, believe it or not. Some themes will take a theme and spawn others.
More questions:
Will WordPress be potted to other programming languages (you could re write WordPress in Phython, but you lose backwards comparability, which was Apple's mistake).
When will BuddyPress be available? Matt said it is not ready yet, but at the moment, the end of this year.
Will WordPress be offered in Educational Institutions? Yes, training is happening. In fact, the better journalists, the power is being put back to the people that actually create the content.
Is there an IPO upcoming for Automatic (Matt's Company) and WordPress, which is the public company. Matt is in it for the long haul and his investors include The New York Times. Matt feels his financial interests in line with the community of users and all his code is open source.
Link to original post