WordPress Guru & Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg gave a speech at the recent GigaOm’s Structure 09 conference in San Francisco, where he spoke on cloud computing and wordpress.com’s server infrastructure. The speech was reported on by Rich Miller at datacenterknowledge.com. According to the report, Mullenweg said, “The biggest mistake we made with the Wordpress.com infrastructure was actually buying servers… (buying servers was ) not a utility. Now we lease them all on a month-to-month basis.” According to the presentation, WordPress.com runs “about 5 million sites serving more than 1 billion page views a month. Automattic uses two data center providers, the dedicated hosting specialists ServerBeach (PEER 1) and Layered Technologies.”

Mullenweg went on to say he viewed WordPress.com’s use of Amazon’s S3 storage system “a failure” because it represented a lack of an open source alternative. “When I have to go to the cloud, I consider that a failure. The thing that’s been most exciting to me is how the open source tools have evolved.” The summary, for those who would like to learn from the experience of running one of the most highly trafficked, multi-user blog sites on the internet? Use leased servers rather than investing in your own data center, that way you can keep on the latest and most up to date boxes without having to cover the cost of the perpetual upgrades, management staff for the data center, and infrastructure / backup facilities.

Month to month leasing also keeps open the negotiation options for a large hosting account like WordPress when dealing with service providers, rather than getting locked into a long term contract or HR staffing issue. This makes a lot of sense. For example, I recently looked into opening a data center in India based around Virident Eco Ram servers, 4 at around $5000 each. Add office space in an Indian IT Park ($400-$500 p/month), backup power supply and power synchronizers ($5000), cooling system ($2500), 24 hour sys admin staff ($36-$40,000 p/year), internet backbone connection ($1250-$2000 p/year?), utilities ($100-$150 p/month), etc. and the total quickly adds up. Granted you likely do not need 24 hour sys admin for 4 servers, but how to maintain a data center without on-site security and maintenance? Compare this total cost to what you would receive over a similar time period with leased servers. Easy math.

This is why Mullenweg ended up advising start-ups, small development companies, and media groups not to try to compete with what the major tech companies are doing with web infrastructure. “My challenge to everyone competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft is to remember that you’re competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft,” he said. “These are strong technology companies, and if you’re going to compete with them, open source is the only way to do that. Otherwise, you have no leverage.”

What then is the “open source equivalent” of a cloud server, when one of the main aspects to the cloud is “utility banks” of grid servers that can expand and contract around the traffic needs of an individual site? With shared, leased, or dedicated servers you are renting a fixed amount of disk space or a set number of machines. It is the ability to scale to meet the highest peak demand, digg-effect, etc. that the cloud is delivering through mass, corporate data banks. Unless someone develops a “distributed computing” model of sharing cpu resources across a network to freely scale in times of peak traffic, and many “open source” servers joined together to share resources in this way, I don’t see an exact “open source equivalent” to the grid. Maybe it is Bittorrent, LimeWire P2P networks, but the performance there is a lot different from Akamai or RackSpace.

Mullenweg recommended the nginx web server for load balancing:

“nginx has been running for more than four years on many heavily loaded Russian sites including Rambler (RamblerMedia.com).
In March 2007 about 20% of all Russian virtual hosts were served or proxied by nginx.
According to Google Online Security Blog year ago nginx served or proxied about 4% of all Internet virtual hosts.
2 of Alexa US Top100 sites use nginx.
According to Netcraft in December 2008 nginx served or proxied 3.5 millions virtual hosts. And now it is on 3rd place (not counting in-house Google server) and ahead of lighttpd.
According to Netcraft in March 2009 nginx served or proxied 3.06% busiest sites.
According to Netcraft in May 2009 nginx served or proxied 3.25% busiest sites.
Here are some of success stories: FastMail.FM, Wordpress.com.”

Source: http://nginx.net/

Optimizing a dedicated server for a high traffic site and “cloud hosting” are very different undertakings. An open source alternative to this aspect of “the cloud” would involve users sharing their CPU cycles with other users around the world or locally on the same network during peak traffic or spinning off virtual clones of the site during overflow to another machine to handle the load. There would seem to be a number of security issues that would arise, and ultimately, somewhere there has to be charity – people giving up their processing power and bandwidth when it is not being used, sharing empty, allocated disk space – entire websites at the end of a torrent, mirrored on different servers. Right now it is basically the SETI Screensaver as a model of the open cloud.

If you have your own data center or dedicated cluster, Apache Hadoop is an open source distributed option: http://hadoop.apache.org/core/

Related: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00193ED1V01Y200905CAC006

Read the full Article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/25/mullenweg-open-source-trumps-the-cloud/

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Mullenweg: Biggest WordPress.com Mistake – “Buying Servers”

Following the release of their WordPress for Joomla module, which integrates two of the most popular open source content management systems, CorePHP has just released an update that adds support for WordPress MU (Multi-User). Many sites like to differentiate the theme of the blog section from the main design, and for those using the WordPress MU plugin, all of the individual users will be able to customize their own blog. The display of the page will be similar to the “wrapper” function of Joomla – the base Joomla theme will wrap around the user blog page, allowing for the retention of main site navigation, blocks, and banners, while giving the freedom to create to the individual bloggers.

Many multi-user sites will have bloggers more familiar with WordPress than Joomla due to its ease of use for web publishing, so this plugin will allow webmasters to give their clients & community the best of both worlds when it comes to publication options. Combining this with the emerging Joomla enterprise versions allowing multi-site hosting of 1000’s of sites under the same administration hood, the WordPress for Joomla module becomes even more powerful and expansive.

“WordPress for Joomla is the most complete blogging soution for Joomla 1.5. While Joomla! is extremely versatile, it does not make for the best blogging platform. WordPress is the best blogging platform there is. With its ease of use and its pure blogging power you could not ask for anything else. WordPress is very rich in features, allowing authors to password protect their posts, as well as have WordPress decide if comments are spam or not with great accuracy. You can even blog on your iPhone/iPod Touch directly onto your Joomla! site!”

Information about the WordPress Multi User version can be found here:
http://www.corephp.com/wordpress-mu/wordpress-mu-for-joomla.html

At the CMS Learning & Business conference, Lead Developer Rafael Corral presented a seminar on the Wordpress MU for Joomla module, saying:

“”You will no longer need to display WordPress inside a wrapper! This solution will blow your mind!”

CMSWire has done a nice write up of the seminar, reporting:

“Corral listed the primary benefits of WordPress within Joomla:

• Use of tags
• 3000 WordPress plugins
• Finely tuned SEO capabilities

Just released, the component is subscription based and costs US$ 80 a year and the multi-user component US$ 100.”

These are important modules for Joomla as it continues to expand as a web platform. The ability to integrate different bulletin board softwares like Vbulletin and SMF have been very popular with web designers, as well as integrating with 3rd party image software like Gallery 2 or other ecommerce platforms. The integration of stand alone CMS software systems like these into Joomla increase the complexity, design, and configuration options for webmasters who need to build complex sites and social networks.

How does running WordPress and Joomla together in the same installation affect performance?

“Some load time issues will occur because of using two applications. Corral says front-end time issue is insignificant, there might be some longer load times in admin section.”

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

CorePHP releases WordPress MU for Joomla Module

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic, announced the release of BuddyPress last week on the official WordPress site. The BuddyPress site is live, with free downloads and installation instructions for BuddyPress 1.0 – which expands a typical WordPress blog installation into a full social network with most of the features of mySpace, Facebook, Ning, and other popular sites. My first reaction on this is… amazing, massive, incredible, exactly what was needed, soon to be huge, and really nice design over all. Congratulations to all involved in the development and publication of this release, it looks like a very important move in the future evolution of the WordPress platform and something that will encourage many social network developers to build with the CMS.

“What if there was software with the elegance and extensibility of WordPress but all the features you’ve come to expect from social networks like Facebook? Now there is: check out BuddyPress. BuddyPress is an official sister project of WordPress. The idea behind it was to see what would happen to the web if it was as easy for anyone to create a social network as it is to create a blog today. There’s been an explosion of social activity on the web, it’s probably the most important trend of the past few years, but there’s been a dearth of Open Source tools that enable the social web. In WordPress we have a robust and extensible base that can scale to many millions of users, and BuddyPress is essentially a set of plugins on top of WordPress that add private messaging, profiles, friends, groups, activity streams, and everything else you’ve come to expect from your favorite social network, like a Facebook-in-a-box.”

To take a look at the BuddyPress demo site, visit: http://testbp.org/

BuddyPress includes user profiles, private messaging, friends / buddylists, groups, activity streams, a wall / stream like section called “the wire” for status updates and tweet-like on-site micro-blogging, in addition to multi-user blogs and forums. I use this same profile quite a lot in building social networks with Drupal using Panels, Advanced Profile Kit, Buddylist, Private Message, Flag, Activity Stream, Views, CCK, Content Profile / Bio, Organic Groups, and other modules. Because of the multiple development teams managing the combination of modules needed to build the working equivalent of this in Drupal, and the 5.x / 6.x / 7.x development cycle variations + all the time assembling, theming, and debugging a social network install in Drupal… the out of the box offering from BuddyPress will be a strong challenge.

For examples of sites that have been built with BuddyPress, see:

Sample demo profile page: http://testbp.org/members/galen/

WannaNetwork – Online Real Estate Community: http://wannanetwork.com/

Flokka – Women in Business: http://flokka.com/

GrungePress – Online Music Community: http://grungepress.com/

Working daily with both WordPress and Drupal both for web publishing and building social networks for clients, I have long felt WordPress had many advantages for single user blogs (really nice themes, for example) vs. Drupal, but lacked the module expandability to allow the construction of social networks. BuddyPress completely changes that and offers out of the box what is very challenging to build in Drupal. It could save 2 to 3 weeks development time on a complex social network site, and allowing the designer to focus work on the theme and content rather than building the module architecture.

My hope is that Acquia (or another company or developer) will release a “social network” installation profile for Drupal that is similar to this. Despite the large number of social networks built with Drupal, I don’t think there has been anything close to an “official” social networking profile like BuddyPress. One reason for this – and it may be related to the release of BuddyPress as a “sister project” rather than just a collection of modules that plugin to WordPress, is to create a complex social network site that deploys on an installation profile you need to install in a way that the database is pre-populated with all the correct settings, permissions, and everything is automatically positioned in the site by block, section, menu, etc. To do this in Drupal, you basically have to include a mySQL database map with the installation profile – something that I also haven’t seen often, but we are working on at TypeHost. Then you have to have a GUI layer that makes it easy for the user to transform the archetypal site structure into a personal site. From the way it looks, Automattic has done this perfectly with BuddyPress.

In terms of branding, the name is not the absolute best choice here in my opinion, but there must have been a clear reasoning behind not just releasing it as another version of WordPress, like “WordPress – SN (Social Network)” vs. “WordPress (Blog or Standard version).” Also it is interesting that the projects seem to be on independent / co-dependent / inter-related development paths, but that BuddyPress is not being considered “the next” version of WordPress. Again, similar to Drupal, there is some decision making that sees these not as “core” modules – despite the fact that many people see them as core to the functionality of the CMS. WordPress functioning as a full social network may not be needed by the majority of single user blog publishers who use the CMS as a platform, but this release is going to make a big difference on the web. It will be interesting to chart the usership statistics of BuddyPress vs. WordPress over the next year to see how many sites adopt the new changes.

Summary: combined with WordPress themes and publishing ease, the addition of full social network functionality to the platform with the release of BuddyPress 1.0 is a slam dunk / home run for Automattic, bloggers, traditional WordPress users, and social network developers. Look to see this on even more websites than WordPress in the future, and to pull a lot of development away from Drupal, which still lacks a unified offering that builds a social network as simply and easily as BuddyPress.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Automattic releases BuddyPress – Official “Sister Project” to WordPress

With all of the news about a possible Twitter sale to Google, I am wondering if we will see an increased trend in clients looking for micro-blogging sites and “Twitter Clones” for local and niche communication. Already, I am offering Twitter and Social Network integration (Facebook, mySpace) to clients on blog and ecommerce sites, to easily connect with friends, community, marketing, communication, etc. that takes place on those sites from the main domain. More and more people are including their Facebook status messages and Twitter stream on their homepages, using the API & RSS feeds those sites offer to pull social content across network channels.

WordPress Plugins:

Xavisys, the web development company behind WebDevNews.net, has created a Twitter feed module for WordPress called WordPress Twitter Widget Pro.

Drupal Modules:
For Drupal, I find the best module to be Activity Stream.

This module will republish all of your “tweets” into your Drupal site, as well as building a stream from your Facebook, Digg, Delicious, and other social networking and bookmarking sites. Highly recommended.

Also very promising for Drupal, but still in development, is the Facebook Status module (Facebook-style Statuses).

As expected, this module replicates the Facebook “Wall” and allows users to post status messages on their user profile pages. When I tried the module previously, there were still some bugs that would have prevented its use on a live site, but huge potential here with this module and a 2.0 version is now released.

The Twitter module allows users to:

1. Associate one of more Twitter accounts with their Drupal user account
2. Have their tweets displayed in a sidebar block or on their user profile
3. Post to their own Twitter account or a site-wide Twitter account whenever they create new content

http://drupal.org/project/twitter

The Tapatio Projects seeks to build an installation profile for Drupal that “enable(s) users to leverage a drupal system as a front end to twitter.com (and other sources in the future) allowing them to use drupal as a hub for message aggregation, moderation, and dispatching.”

http://drupal.org/project/tapatio

http://drupal.org/project/tapatio_installation_profile

Stan alone CMS Software:

If you are interested in breaking out from a CMS like Drupal or WordPress and building a site that is a stand alone micro-blogging platform like Twitter, the Laconica open source software may be of interest.

For an example of a Laconica site, see: http://identi.ca/

The alternative to Laconica (but operating on the same open source micro-blogging standard) is Open Microblogger

By design, the open-source micro-blogging sites share an API to allow easy cross posting and searching of messages between sites. They also have more advanced built in SMS capabilities, something you will have to add extra modules for in Drupal & WordPress.

Whether your client is requesting Twitter integration into their home page or business site, or you have a request to build a full micro-blogging platform, one of these solutions should make a good base to build upon.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Open Source Micro-Blogging CMS Software & Twitter Integrations

This year, more than ever, I wanted to do my part by giving back this holiday season. So here’s what I came up with:

I created a special package of 70 eye-catching header graphics to be used on your websites, blogs, or other projects. 20 of the header graphics are specifically to replace the Kubrick header on the WordPress default theme.

The price of the package is just $5 and I’m donating $2.50 of each sale to The Salvation Army. On December 24, I plan on issuing a cheque to The Salvation Army for the amount I’ve raised up to that point.

Your support is greatly appreciated. If you would like more information, please visit:
http://karenblundell.com/headers.php

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

70 Header Graphics

An interesting article appeared on the front page of the drupal.org website, detailing the migration of the popular “crooks and liars” blog from WordPress to Drupal. According to the developers, when the site was averaging around the “200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for Wordpress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for Wordpress to handle the replication.” After experiencing a high degree of server downtime from the massive number of comments on the site, “crooks and liars” began to consider porting the site to Drupal for performance issues.

According to the site development team, benchmark tests showed that a Drupal 5.x installation was able to serve more than 8 times the number of pages per second vs. a standard WordPress 2.3 set up:

“I setup default installations of Wordpress 2.3 and Drupal 5. I only enabled the core caching mechanisms in both setups and populated them with the exact same data and display options. Both systems also used the default themes and features. After running a series of tests through JMeter, I quickly confirmed my beliefs and even exceeded them as I saw Drupal was able to handle about eight times the requests per second as Wordpress, both on the front page and the same single post view with 157 comments.”

An interesting overview of the migration, and custom modules used in the development of the “crooks and liars” site can be found online here:

http://drupal.org/node/341231

What is more interesting, is after the post was published, WordPress / Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg weighed in personally on the issue, by commenting on the post and listing ways to configure WordPress to scale to 20 million hits per day – at a cost of only $100 per month. He writes:

“Always sorry to see someone leave WordPress, but you ended up pretty much the other best place I could think of. Features are a great reason to switch, but scaling doesn’t need to be. We host some of the largest poltical blogs like all of CNN’s which regularly get thousands of comments per day and we do about a billion pageviews a month on WordPress.com, so here are some tips for future people who may come across this post (some which may be useful to the Drupal community as well):

1. Every release of WP gets faster, so upgrading can get you sometimes significant boosts depending on your bottleneck.
2. Use the memcached object cache backend.
3. If memcached is set up, use Batcache instead of wp-cache.
4. If you get a lot of comments, consider using InnoDB as your storage engine instead of MyISAM inside of MySQL.
5. Double-check that your webserver is set up properly for static requests, this is the cause of 90%+ of the problems we see.

With the above and a single $100/month server from LT you can get around 20,000,000 pageviews a day. With shared Batcache and HyperDB (which you already used, nice) it’s a lot easier to scale out both the web and database tier independently as needed. We haven’t found the upper limit of this strategy yet.”

Included are links to Quantcast’s statistics proving 1 billion page hits per month on wordpress.com (globally): http://www.quantcast.com/p-18-mFEk4J448M/traffic

Link to the Memcache Plugin: http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/memcached/trunk

Link to the Batcache Plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/

According to the site:

“Development testing showed a 40x reduction in page generation times: pages generated in 200ms were served from the cache in 5ms. Traffic simulations with Siege demonstrate that WordPress can handle up to twenty times more traffic with Batcache installed.”

Based on Quantcast statistics, Drupal.org ranks 13,298 overall while WordPress.org ranks #11. Global tracking statistics are not available for drupal.org on the site.

http://www.quantcast.com/drupal.org

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Mullenweg: Scale WordPress to 20,000,000 Views per Day for $100 p/month

Xavisys, a professional WordPress development company specializing in website design, custom module programming, WordPress themes, and ecommerce solutions, has acquired the blog site Attackr.com to add to their media and publishing division. Xavisys was founded by Aaron Campbell six years ago in Phoenix, Arizona, and is also the design group behind WebDevNews.net. Attackr.com is a collective of tech bloggers working primarily in WordPress development offering news, “how to” guides, and plenty of tips and tricks. Web developers are encouraged to share their thoughts, experience, and design tips on both Attackr.com and WebDevNews.net, and to participate in the Open Design Community.

Xavisys

Xavisys was started in 2002 as a web development firm specializing in custom PHP solutions for web applications, and subsequently began focusing in web design and web development for Open Source Content Management Systems. According to company founder Aaron Campbell, “the experience doing things from scratch helps a lot when it comes to creating custom solutions for an Open Source project.” Aaron is a PayPal Certified Developer, and many of their clients seek advanced ecommerce solutions with integration of the PayPal API. Xavisys creates modules and plug-ins for WordPress, as well as WordPress themes, and is also developing for the Magento, Joomla, and Drupal platforms. After launching WebDevNews.net this year as a place for blogging on web development news and information, the company has recently acquired Attackr.com. It is hoped that the partnership and shared communication between the sites in the Xavisys network will lead to enhanced personal and creative partnerships among Open Source developers, as well as increased business to business networking.

Xavisys – WordPress Plugins:

WordPress Google Analytics Plugin

Provides an easy way to integrate Google Analytics into your WordPress Blog
Download: http://xavisys.com/2007/02/wordpress-google-analytics-plugin/

WordPress Twitter Widget Pro Plugin

Add Twitter feeds to your WordPress blog, including friends, profile images, & link parsing
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/04/wordpress-twitter-widget/

Google Maps for Wordpress

Easily integrate Google Maps displays into your Wordpress blog and customize the settings
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/04/google-maps-for-wordpress/

WordPress Gallery Widget Pro Plugin

Displays rotating images from a post’s gallery in the sidebar of your site
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/05/gallery-widget-pro/

WordPress Reorder Gallery Plugin

Modifies the Wordpress “gallery shortcode” to allow you to manually reorder the images in embedded gallery slideshows. This was included into WordPress 2.6 core and is only needed for WordPress 2.5.x
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/05/wordpress-reorder-gallery-plugin/

WordPress Mark Parent Pages Plugin

Adds collapsible menus to WordPress by inserting custom CSS tags in list displays. This was included in WordPress 2.5 core, and is only needed for older version of WordPress
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/01/wordpress-mark-parent-pages-plugin/

Validate Empty Wordpress Posts/Pages

Fixes tag wrapping in empty pages, preventing them from being invalidated
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/01/validate-empty-wordpress-postspages/

Xavisys – Image Free Templates:

Minimalist:

An extremely light weight, configurable template, with no images at all
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/01/free-template-minimalist/

BlueBox:

A simple, fluid width, imageless, XHTML Strict 1.0 template
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/01/free-template-bluebox/

Attackr

Attackr.com evolved from a partnership of WordPress developers active in the Open Design Community, and is a place for web designers to share news, information, “how to” guides, technology reviews, and personal thoughts on the development scene. The site has a core group of bloggers that post on these topics, and is open for new members who would like to share ideas on the platform. The Attackr theme is one of the best I’ve seen for WordPress, which is not surprising as that is the specialization of the design team behind the site.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Xavisys Acquires Attackr.com – Web Development News Network

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, announced on his blog that Automattic has just acquired the company Poll Daddy, to shore up a lack of integrated polling functionality on the popular Open Source blogging platform. According to Mullenweg, polling has become very popular with WordPress users, and there are over a dozen different companies developing polling plugins for the CMS. Yet, when looking at the top sites, the “Poll Daddy” functionality was most favored. Upon investigation, it turns out the company was run by two programmers in Ireland – Mullenweg traveled there, had a few beers with the crew, and acquired the company for Automattic.

Looking at the functionality of “Poll Daddy,” the main advantages are in its flexibility and ability to be customized. There are a number of skins available for the plugin, and developers can modify the display easily through CSS. HTML customizations can be used to add image, video, and multimedia files. Poll Daddy adds realtime data reporting from polls and surveys to a WordPress site, and the data can be exported through XML, RSS, or CSV. In setting up questions, there are over ten different formats to select from, which can be further configured in the control panel.

The use of conditional branching allows you to split surveys into different paths depending on the answers given by the user. Thus Poll Daddy allows you to create highly complex surveys on a WordPress site, and the pages themselves can be styled individually. Repeat visitors can be automatically blocked from retaking the poll using IP analysis tools, and with the “Pro” version, there are a lot more options for tracking and vote counting. Interestingly, Poll Daddy isn’t limited only to WordPress – it can also be integrated in other blogging software like Blogger and TypePad, as well as on social networking platforms.

There are three versions of Poll Daddy – Free, Pro, and Pro2. The biggest difference is when you pay for the software, the proprietary link to the developer’s website is removed. Other than that, you get support for more responses and questions per survey. The “Free” version only allows for 10 questions and 100 responses per month, which may be limiting to many. For reference, the “Pro” version upgrade is $200 per year and includes 1,000 survey responses per month plus unlimited questions, while the “Pro2” version is $899 per year with 10,000 survey responses. The two “Pro” versions also include tech support by phone.

The highest profile users of Poll Daddy are Wired, Fox, PC World, TechCrunch, and Read/Write Web. According to Mullenweg, the service has just been enabled for an additional 4.4 million blogs on wordpress.com. If you want to try out the plugin on a WordPress site hosted on your own servers, the download is available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/polldaddy/ and more information can be found at the Poll Daddy site.

Looking at the announcement on wordpress.com, there doesn’t seem to be a single negative comment from the community on this:

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/polldaddy/

Where other Open Source projects are meandering currently, the constant improvement of WordPress through version upgrades and 3rd party acquisitions such as IntenseDebate and Poll Daddy show Automattic leading the CMS project in a great, new direction, building on the success and popularity of the platform to make it even better.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Automattic Acquires Poll Daddy – Integrated Polls & Surveys for WordPress

The WordPress 2.7 release is scheduled to be ready on November 10th – for those interested in an early preview of the new features, a set of black and white wireframes showing the current navigation structure has been released at:

http://wpdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/wf-dashboard_v002_093008jw.pdf

What major changes will we see in the new 2.7 WordPress release? The biggest is that the main navigation menu has been shifted to the left side. The logic here is to reduce the amount of scrolling needed on pages and to increase the amount of content space in the main section. The header size has also been reduced and “includes breadcrumb navigation links in place of the large screen headline in the work area”. I see this as a nod in many ways to the trend highlighted by the release of Google Chrome, which includes quite a bit more active space in the main frame of the browser compared to IE and Firefox, and of course to the continued rise of AJAX in user interfaces to dynamically load content without refreshing the page.

WordPress 2.7 looks also to bring back a customizable “widget” configuration for the composition section, which will allow for the dragging and dropping of navigation elements to create a personalized admin area. There is also more ability to turn on and off elements in the write panel display. The “Add Media” buttons are condensed to a single widget, and is expected to include buttons for video, flash, and other file types as well as standard image files. A new feature is the “Quick Press” option, through which you can publish posts without going through the main editor page. The “What’s Hot” module is being evolved into a more comprehensive feed reader, and elements from the newly acquired “IntenseDebate” related to threaded comments are already being incorporated into the new release.

The main theme seen through most of the changes is condensation of all the page elements to fit on the screen without the need to scroll. This includes the ability to collapse and remove navigation elements to streamline the display. This is being applied to the category management, tags, media library, comment moderation, and post editing sections as well as the composition section and main dashboard. There has also been some renaming of major site sections, particularly related to the “Design” menu which will now be known as “Templates”. A new menu section for “Utilities” will be added, and a centralization of all the “Content” management sections under one tab.

The initial reaction from bloggers and alpha testers on the redesign announcements has been positive. For example, Allen Sterns of Information Week writes:

“The administration interface in the 2.7 release looks amazing. While I find the current version very strong, the new version makes the process of managing a blog even easier. There’s more flexibility for publishers to provide only the necessary features for different users. Another major change is the ability to install plugins with one click. The plugin gallery is now available directly from within the admin panel. Plugins can be installed with one click — no more download, unzip, upload, install. They are working to make the theme gallery function the same way so you can install a theme with one click. The navigation is now docked on the left side of the page and nearly all of the components can be shifted to make the perfect layout for your needs.”

Or as Mark Evans states:

“For all the excitement about Wordpress 2.5 with its pretty new design, Wordpress didn’t change all that much for me. The layout was different, the design (provided by hot-shot consulting firm, Happy Cog) was a lot more user-friendly but Wordpress continued to be Wordpress. By that, I didn’t do much with it other than install a few plugins – after getting used to the new widget system. Most important, I continued to ignore Wordpress’ publishing tool; using Ecto as my publishing tool. But judging by what I saw yesterday at WordCamp Toronto, that could all change with Wordpress 2.7, which Matt Mullenweg announced will be released next month. In particular, the dashboard and the writing tool are going to be overhauled in a major way that I think are going to be a lot more interesting and exciting than Wordpress 2.5.”

While some have suggested the new system will be difficult to learn, and that major design and navigational changes should have been pushed back to a 3.0 release, it is certain that there is already significant buzz rolling about the new changes in WordPress 2.7 and the new design looks certain to cement the CMS’s reputation as the favorite of bloggers around the world.

For more information on the wireframes, see the official WordPress blog at:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/10/wordpress-27-wireframes/

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

WordPress 2.7 Wireframes Released – Previewing New CMS Design

Automattic, the company behind the development of the popular WordPress content management system, announced today that they acquired IntenseDebate, an online service that provides a system for threaded commenting and tracks user activity across multiple websites. The financial terms related to the agreement were not released, but the announcement comes after several moves by WordPress to acquire strategic companies whose services expand the core functionality of the CMS. Examples of this are the previous acquisitions of bbPress (a forum software company), Gravatar (cross site avatar support), and Ping-O-Matic (pingbacks). IntenseDebate announced on their blog that they were happy to be joining the Automattic team, and would be going back into development to build new features for the system. Some of IntenseDebate’s functionality is slated to become part of the WordPress code base, with a plugin available for integrating its more advanced services into the CMS.

Jon Fox, a 23 year old Computer Science graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis and co-founder of IntenseDebate, was interviewed last month by Center Networks, where he described the service:

“IntenseDebate is a replacement to your stock comment system on blogs and websites. We provide a tool to better facilitate community and interaction by adding loads of new features. Some of my favorites include Reply-by-email (reply to a comment by replying in email to the email notification), threading, voting, universal profiles, reputation, and the ability to track a user and/or topic across blogs.”

According to the interview, the IntenseDebate team consists of only six people:
• CEO – Tom Keller
• CTO – Jon Fox
• Graphics/Design – Isaac Keyet
• Voice of the users – Michael Koenig
• Software Engineer – Austin Hallock
• Software Engineer – Mehmet Alkanlar

The company has seen a regular increase in user statistics since the service was launched, according to Compete going from around 25,000 views per month in April to 350,000 views in August. Overall, the site boasted a 2505% increase in traffic in 2008.

The main competition to IntenseDebate is Disqus, which Compete ranks at #1,797 compared to IntenseDebate at #5,000. In comparison, Disqus went from about 25,000 views per month in August of 2007 to nearly 900,000 views last month, a rise of 3042% over the year. The surge in popularity driving both sites is definitely something WordPress is looking to tap into.

Don Dodge, part of the Microsoft Emerging Business Team, writes on his blog of an email interchange with IntenseDebate CEO Tom Keller. He writes:

“Earlier this week I sent a note to Tom Keller, CEO of IntenseDebate, and asked him for reasons why I should use IntenseDebate. The three reasons he gave me were almost the same three reasons that Fred Wilson cites in his post; (‘Three Reasons to Use Disqus’)
1) Threading comments makes them easier to read,
2) Better user interaction and community,
3) More comments, maybe 5X more comments.”

Based on this analysis, which seems to be correct, WordPress users can expect more comment activity on their posts following the addition of the new services from IntenseDebate. It appears that Automattic has made a great choice in solidifying the platform to ride this continuing internet trend.

Announcement:

http://www.intensedebate.com/blog/2008/09/23/automattic-acquires-intensedebate/

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Automattic Acquires IntenseDebate – Multisite Threaded Comments