Tag Archives: Matt Mullenweg

I’m Biased, But Try Movable Type and Drupal

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Anil Dash has written an article titled “A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide” on the official movabletype.com blog. It is full of misdirection, and, thankfully, overall it hasn’t been well received. What excites me is it has sparked some excellent discussions, and it’s a great launching point for more conversations.

I whole heartily recommend you try the open source flavor of Movable Type. It is clearly a great product created by fantastic people.

If you are thinking you only have time to try one other blogging software than WordPress, my time and money is on Drupal. People bringing Drupal into the conversation as an alternative has been one of my favorite parts of the discussions. Built on the same PHP stack that powers WordPress and much of the rest of the high performance web. Drupal is the full featured CMS with the heart and minds of the open source communities (I hang out with). Its blogging experience isn’t as polished out of the box as WP or MT, but it’s getting there — and we’re working hard at staying focused and one step ahead of them ;-)

If you have time please do share what you love about these other personal publishing environment, particularly if it relates to something that annoys you about WordPress. This way WordPress participants can respond by letting our code do the talking.

If you are currently using WordPress then your highest priority will likely be to plan to take a look at WordPress 2.5 as a release candidate will be coming very soon — watch the WordPress Development blog for the news.

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Media Library and WordPress Plugin Challenge

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WordPress 2.5 will be the first release with more than a rudimentary image and media experience right out of the box. There are now add media buttons in the editor, the manage menu includes media library, and there is a gallery.

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Firefox 3 Saved, Cookies Still Too Tasty By Default

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On Sunday, Mozilla developers reverted a change to cookie handling that was going to make web mashup and widget developers’ lives horrible in Firefox 3 — it would likely have been a disaster for Firefox and Mozilla. Thank you team Mozilla for addressing this in such a timely manner!

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WordPress and your Problems at MooseCamp!

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Bloggers and problems enter, only bloggers exit!

Friday, Feb 22, day 1 of the 4th annual Northern Voice including an “internet bootcamp” for people new to blogging, Facebook, podcasting, wikis, and more. It is an awesome logging conference being held again at the Forestry Sciences Centre at UBC! It’s Tim Bray’s “favorite little blogger conclave.” This conclave is really for everyone, but if you don’t already have a ticket, see you next year.

The other part of day 1 will be the MooseCamp Unconference, the third year of this self-organizing, community from chaos event. The moose are loose and they converge to converse again! Organic and from the hip and with food this year!

Like any good participant in creations from chaos, I’m late in organizing a session — or maybe early because many sessions will be unveiled right at the event. Anyway, over the last week, I’ve been making some virtual calls to WordPress aficionados attending Northern Voice, very modest ones at that, and the result is a dynamic session where we will work together to solve our WordPress problems, WordPress and your Problems.

The plan — plan to change — is for the first half to be spent discussing problems and experiences in small groups and then us all coming together to discuss the groups’ discoveries and some of the problems that still taught us with the whole group.

Hopefully, in the small groups, you will also swap blogging stories and 411.

Some of the small groups could be solving problems related to:

Additional experts on hands:

The groups will be formed around your problems. What problem do you need help with? Post a comment here or add to the wiki page.

As I mentioned each of these aficionados is modest — some I had to trick to volunteer — and I bet you are modest too. WordPress is a rich environment, and by sharing your insights with us, you will surprise yourself with your own expertise . You will also be surprised that we have the same problems. Is there an interesting problem that you have solved and can help others solve to?

Depending on where the interest is we will reconfigure the session on the fly.

It won’t be scheduled during Blogging 101 or Photocamp. Any other sessions to avoid butting heads with? I won’t be arriving until Friday morning, because I’m still through mid-April at the Pregnancy Conference and after that I will be at the First Baby Conference for at least a few months. If there is interest some of us can get together later in the day and take a look at WordPress 2.5 which is still in development, but nearing beta quality, but I want this to be focused on solving people’s problems today.

Welcome to the Thunderdome! Bloggers and problems enter, only bloggers exit!

Thunderdome

We Raised $29.5 Million!

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Matt, now Ma.tt, and Toni have respectively written “Act Two” and “Automattic fundraising” about us, Automattic, raising a $29.5 million USD round of financing today. Our friend Om has a head start on journalistic coverage with “WordPress.com Creator Raises $29.5M“.

By “we” in the title, I mean I have absolutely nothing to do with the financial matters, so don’t ask.

This development is, of course, a little distracting at the moment, but that will quickly fade.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. We have good, popularly, highly regarded solutions to important, interesting problems. There are many challenges we want to continue to refine our solutions to and many areas we have just started to explore — so many things are too hard, and we know we can help. Most importantly we will stay focused on relationships between real people and being dynamic to your needs — which is really what the web and particularly blogging are all about.

I’m as excited to working for Automattic today as the day I started. Has it really only been just over a year? My job description, like all job descriptions, has changed a lot in this short, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.

I now spend about half my time working with Raanan, Barry, and Michael and the “major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more…” the emerging ones like Giga Omni, Gawker Media’s Gizmodo Live, Blog Talk Radio, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and I Can Has Cheezburger.

The rest of my time is focused on participating in WordPress.org.

I love the diversity of challenges my roles expose me to. I love that WordPress is a near universal solution for online publishing, empowering the personal publishers and the major media organizations.

But most of all I love the people. Bloggers and open source participants are the among the most wonderful people I have ever met!

But along the way you still have to feel with some stinker technical challenges and personal conflicts, and that is where my favorite Automattic part comes into play. Every member of the Automattic team I learn from every day and every one of them I would love to call friend.