WordPress is a community of hundreds of people that read the code every day, audit it, update it, and care enough about keeping your blog safe that we do things like release updates weeks apart from each other even though it makes us look bad, because updating is going to keep your blog safe from the bad guys. I’m not clairvoyant and I can’t predict what schemes spammers, hackers, crackers, and tricksters will come up with with in the future to harm your blog, but I do know for certain that as long as WordPress is around we’ll do everything in our power to make sure the software is safe. We’ve already made upgrading core and plugins a one-click procedure. If we find something broken, we’ll release a fix. Please upgrade, it’s the only way we can help each other.

Matt Mullenweg, September 5, 2009, “How to Keep WordPress Secure“,

Do read the rest of the potent post — articulate, insightful, and honest.

At first this article left me very upset, maybe because I found it quite persuasive, but then I reflected that for anyone developing and selling proprietary software, Daniel’s is the only position to believe in and promote.

When you first try WordPress 2.5, it will feel like it has changed a lot, possibly for the worst (my wife Julia had her concerns). Change is hard. Take a deep breath, and be patient with yourself and WordPress as you explore the new experience. You will surprise yourself how adapt at change you are, and I’m betting you will soon love the new WordPress.

We did hide a few bugs in there — remember there is no such thing as “user error” — so take notes of the problems and challenges you encounter. Write them down when you first encounter them, reflect on which you think are the worst, and blog about them, discuss them on the forums, mailing list, or report them in our bug tracker.

Only together can we make WordPress even better by fixing the worst problems in maintenance releases (the next likely in about a month), and fixing the other challenges and most important us working together to incorporate all your ideas!

The product speaks for itself, but I often find the WordPress participants too modest to blow their own horns, so here is what Matt wrote:

The Community is Growing

More than growing, it’s on fire. We always talk about things like downloads, and the 2.3 branch has already had 1.92 million downloads as I write this post, but this time we have some far more interesting information I’d like to share.

There were over 1,200 commits to our repository since 2.3.0 and over 90 people were credited in them. This means in our core code, not plugins, there were at least 90 individual folks that contributed something high-quality enough that it made the cut to be part of the download you guys get today. I had no idea this group of people was so large.

Outside of the core commit team, there was particular help from these people, in rough order of number of credits and tickets: mdawaffe (Michael Adams), azaozz (Andrew Ozz), nbachiyski (Nikolay Bachiyski), andy (Andy Skelton), iammattthomas (Matt Thomas), tellyworth (Alex Shiels), josephscott (Joseph Scott), lloydbudd (Lloyd Budd), DD32 ( Dion Hulse), filosofo (Austin Matzko), hansengel (Hans Engel), pishmishy (James Davis), ffemtcj, Viper007Bond, ionfish (Benedict Eastaugh), jhodgdon (Jennifer Hodgdon), Otto42, thee17 (Charles E. Free-Melvin), and xknown (Alexander Concha). Also want to thank MichaelH and Lorelle on the documentation side, and moshu, Kafkaesqui, whooami, MichaelH, Otto42, and jeremyclark13 for helping with support.

And that is just a very small slice of the people that make WordPress the best blogging software in the world! I always want to write more about the people that make WordPress special for me. I would love to read about the people that make WordPress wonderful for you.

Yesterday , we, WordPress won Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.

Who are we?

Well, this is a really hard question to answer, and you aren’t going to find me trying, but I can share a little bit about the small percentage of the people I know that make WordPress amazing.

WordPress 2.3 is the third major release since WordPress became my working life. This is a special release for me because mid-September marked my one year with the Automattic team.

The greatest reason why it is the most special release for me so far is not the awesome improvements to the product, but the collaboration… and yeah, the awesome improvements to the product are a direct result of the collaboration.

As I wrote the other day, “Before WordPress, I haven’t ever been part of a community of this size where people support each other so well”. When I think of the tens of thousands of people that participate in WordPress, I get totally overwhelmed. What really boggles my mind is that these people aren’t participating passively, and each individuals contribution can be identified, whether it is as simple as choosing WordPress, helping a friend set it up, or as unexpected and involved as the year that Robin Adrianse spent among the top five code contributors to WordPress — I miss you Robin, but I know you are up to awesome things with more ahead for you.

Almost all of the people that I saluted in WordPress 2.2 Source Code Worth $1 Million! deserve recognition, but I’m not going to duplicate the link love fest — though they all most certainly deserve it. I will mention some of the many WordPress members that inspire me and keep me excited about my work.

Ryan continues to get his WordPress pump on while balancing his boy Ronan in his other arm. Equally, Donncha does a similar act with his little one, Adam, and his other baby WordPress MU.

It gives me headaches just thinking about the problems that Mark Jaquith solves. The bugs that Canonical URLs would cause gave me nightmares to go with my headaches, but Mark methodically and thoroughly borrowed, designed, coded and tested this feature, and it hasn’t disturbed my sleep at all.

In that post for WordPress 2.2, I wrote, “Peter Westwood (westi) continues to earn the most consistent contributor award”. Well, that would still be true, except that he is contributing even more now! At the end of September, Matt announced Peter becoming a lead developer and since then not did he play a large role in getting 2.3 polished, he has complimented his debugging and coding by started an invaluable weekly post on development work in WordPress.

Otto42, after the core developers probably considers tickets the most. Along with Otto, Bas Bosman (nazgul) is the chief trac manager and lends a lot of his development expertise to WordPress. Jeremy Visser is a trac worker, a regular contributor, and does not let things fall off the radar.

Daniel Jalkut (dcj) (Red Sweater), developer of MarsEdit worked with our Joseph Scott to scratch a lot of itches and treat some rashes with XML-RPC support. Joseph also worked with the brilliant Tim Bray, Pete Lacey, Elias Torres and Sam Ruby on giving WordPress a good AtomPub.

Jennifer Hodgdon has become WordPress’ development documentation specialist. She is also very generous with her expertise on wp-hackers, and clearly an awesome WordPress plugin and website development.

One month later, it is clear that WordPress 2.3 is the smoothest release . The proof? Maintenance release 2.3.1 with little to scare me.

I’ve made my kudos purposely short, and risk offending many of the amazing people that contribute to WordPress, so please help me out here!

I would love to find a way to met more both online and in real life. Who are your WordPress heroes? Have you remembered to thank them lately?

From today forward I will no longer recommend Movable Type as a viable new media blogging / podcasting platform. I will recommend WordPress to any and all that ask my advice.

Todd elaborates in the comments on the experience in WordPress that has contributed to his conversion:

Wordpress does have native support when you are publishing a post you will see add media at the bottom of the page.

If you add your media there and hit publish the media will be included as a enclosure in your RSS feed.

While you will not have all the fancy itunes tags you can manually edit your rss template and add that data to be included.

To make it easy the podpress plugin makes it easy for you to add the itunes data to the feed.

Another thing to consider is that at least you can publish a podcast with WordPress today. You cannot say the same with MovableType Version 4 it is simply not possible to publish a podcast with the current version of the blogging software.

Welcome to the team Todd!

This is a win for both open source and WordPress. Movable Type (MT) is currently only open source in the press release sense — I do look forward to that changing. Todd Cochrane, with his quick mind and wicked tongue, is a very welcome addition to the WordPress team.

The technical details of the problems Todd Cochrane documented are interesting though not as interesting to me as him not feeling supported by the Movable Type community and the company behind MT, Six Apart.

Before WordPress, I haven’t ever been part of a community of this size where people support each other so well, but don’t think that similar problems to Todd’s don’t affect WordPress. There are a lot of people that still feel outside, and we all can do something about this by lending more than our ideas — whatever you are good at or are interested in learning can help WordPress to be a better product and continue to have the best community.

Dan Kuykendall has done just that. He is the the author of PodPress, and he and his collaborators and contributors’ creation PodPress likely increases Todd’s frustration with MT — nothing bugs me as much as knowing that someone’s tool already has a feature I want. I really enjoyed hearing him speak at WordCamp 2007. PodPress is a big reason why people choose WordPress for podcasting.

WordPress is the best blogging software there is, but it will only stay that way if we listen to the Todd Cochranes, welcome the Todd Cochranes, and thank the Dan Kuykendalls of the world.

There are many more Todd Cochrane and Dan Kuykendalls, though they tend to have different names. Are you one? What are your frustrations? How are you contributing? What are the barriers I can help remove?