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.

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.

I’m disappointed by Anil’s “upgrade guide”, but not surprised. I used to greatly respect Anil Dash, but in the last year I’ve grown to mostly only respect his abilities. He speaks of sincerity, but I don’t see any other way to interpret the following comments, and other parts of his argument, other than being patronizing and insincere:

I should think that the WP community would be more frustrated with Automattic not having the 2.5 release ready (or even a release date) than with someone pointing out that there are good options for bloggers.

And from the same comment:

And honestly, it may well be that Matt isn’t used to the way that competition works when you’re a well-funded company with tens of millions of dollars in the bank. I know it took us a while to adjust to the reality of how perceptions change in that situation. But given that Automattic’s raised many millions more dollars than Six Apart, I certainly don’t think it’s unfair for us as an underdog to point out our strengths.

The least Anil could do was give us some time to spend some of the money before playing the underdog card.

He is also very passionate in the “upgrade guide” about doing everything first. I’m not really interested, nor do I think most people are, in who did what first. When I get focused on firsts, my friends generously either help escape my nostalgia or my indulgent in the latest fad. I’m reminded to refocus on substance, on how the details come together to create the experience, and what real problems we need to solve together.

Solving problems together is the spirt of open source. I explicitly pointed out that Anil’s post is on the .com blog, because although Six Apart has improved its open source message since I wrote ”

Movable Type 200% Open Source!” Six Apart can be an even greater open source ambassador. As I wrote in the discussion around the 200% article, the lack of open source messaging on movabletype.com is one of the things as an open source evangalist I find disheartening. Looking today I could only find a mention of the Movable Type open source flavor [sic] on movabletype.com down in the Pricing FAQ. I find it awkward then that Anil’s “upgrade guide” talks heavily about open source technologies.

I’m a little upset at Michael Sippey’s response “we’re here to compete” in support of Anil’s “upgrade guide”. I had hoped that Anil had made the mistake of writing such an article on his own. In responded to one part of his article I wrote there:

If you think WordPress is “provided by Automattic”, you don’t understand WordPress and how we and most other open source products operate. WordPress is nothing without the participation of the community.

All those other flavors of Movable Type aren’t open source. As I’ve been discussing with Darren Hoyt regarding Expression Engine:

A popular open source platform ensures maintainability (or transition to another popular open platform) and no vendor lock. Sure, it can be good for your own business to use tools that require specialized knowledge and much fewer people have expertise in but even then having to maintain it may affect your sanity later

Boris Mann, champion of Drupal, and VP of Product Development at Raincity Studios says it even more poignantly:

The “enemy” here is proprietary systems (and those really are quotes around enemy, as I recall having a great discussion with a proprietary Java based system developer this morning at CCI2008). They are not good for business, they are not
good for communities, and they are not good for the growth of this
interlinked web of data that is becoming truly useful.

As Matt wrote in “WordPress is Open Source“, “Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the [open source] one doesn’t allow any support.”

Matt wrote “WordPress is Open Source” partially in response to Movable Type product manager and lead developer Byrne Reese’s comment:

@Sunnduwn – I think that is a question better asked of Automattic. Anil, and certainly not Six Apart, has never been briefed, nor has anyone for that matter been presented with an accounting of what is open and closed source at Automattic.

Byrne you or anyone else just have to ask. Actually, I remember you have asked related questions and I answered you as best as could there.

What we produce that isn’t open source relates to some of the work I’ve quietly (out of the public eye, anyway) long been doing with our hosted solutions. I’m always asking, what isn’t open source and why isn’t it?

Please continue to challenge us here, and challenge us more. Sometimes we won’t answer you as quick as you like or provide the source code as quick as you like, but where we hesitate it is most often to make sure that you don’t have to trudge through some quick hacks, but instead get to benefit from what we learn from them. As Matt says “there is more GPL stuff on the way, as well. ”

I do love the passion of the conversations that are taking place! But please don’t take my, Anil, Michael, or Matt’s passionate words on what is a better solution, we are all incredible biased — I don’t trust myself when it comes to talking about WordPress or the competition.

I remember reading the title of Don Dodge’s post “Vista more secure than Linux, Apple OSX, and Windows XP” and thinking “this ought to be rich”. I did have my problems with the article, and shared my thoughts on it (reading it now, I was a little too intense in my arguments — see what I mean about passion), but I came away really respecting Jeff Jones, Director of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft [sic].

Here is how Jeff ends his post “Exactly how biased am I?”

Am I biased? I do not think so, but let’s just all keep assuming I am, because I don’t mind. If I make comparisons, I’ll lay out my metrics. I’ll lay out my assumptions. I’ll describe the methodology. Then, if you want to dispute the results, debate the assumptions, or critique the methodology, I’ll ask the same of you. Regardless of the outcome, all sides will get presented, progress is made and that’s a win for interested readers.

That is where Anil’s article fails. His post is one sound bite after another without at least the minimum of links to the technical details. I also got a kick out of how he is motoring along with his “comparision” [sic] with WordPress, and then switches into “A Dashboard That Measures Success”, “Design Matters”, “Get Support Right From The Source”, which I’m not sure are ways MT differentiates itself positively or maybe at all — anyway, his case there is even less clear than the rest of the article.

Jay Allen also wrote “Nothing was said that was untrue about Movable Type or WordPress and, aside from the cheeky title, the post spoke much more to me about the pride and excitement the team has in their new version which they wanted to communicate to the world.”

If the article was about his team’s pride and excitement that would be awesome, but a large part is actually comparisons without context or substance.

But maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe Shelley Powers’ is correct and “Anil’s post was rather funny, and tongue in cheek”. Or just maybe, Anil read and misunderstand “Overcoming Bias: My Favorite Liar”

I’m really glad for Anil’s “upgrade guide”, because it presents to our face some of the Six Apart FUD that potential customers come to us with when considering either WordPress.com VIP hosting or the Automattic Support Network. As I said, it’s a great launching point for more conversations.

Competition is awesome. Most important is having different open source solutions with focus on different problems, or different solutions to the same problems.

It doesn’t really matter what I think. You all know where all our heart and mind lies. I’m most interested in hearing from people still living in a neutral nation, digging in and getting diry with the design decisions and technical details of the real challenges you need to solve, and how well the WordPress experience treats you in response.

Andy and Alex have been hard at work on it for some time. It’s really impressive and I’ve only started to play with it — it being searchable is a huge enough leap for me. I don’t use a lot of images and other media, so I’m eager to see what you experts think of the experience.

Lorelle describes it as hot. And Matt is eagerly waiting for it to be ready:

My pictures are ready to go, I’m just waiting for certain features within WordPress to start working and creating intermediate sizes so I can upload them to my blog instead of Gallery.

Andy responded

The Media Library only knows about files that have a record in the posts table with post_type = ‘attachment’. These records are created when you upload a file via WordPress. Uploading via FTP, etc., has no effect on the WordPress database.

We do not scan your upload directories and that is not now planned. I would like to see a plugin do this.

So Andy has dropped the gauntlet. Which plugin developer among you will rise to the challenge? You will garner much fame and admiration from your fellow WordPress participants!

Update: Less than 9 hrs since I published this, the amazing Dion Hulse, or as we know him, DD32, has created Add From Server:

A WordPress plugin which allows you to browse the filesystem on the webserver and copy any files into the WordPress uploads system, Once imported it’ll be treated as any other uploaded file, and you can access it via the Media Library.

On wp-testers list Dion adds:

While it doesnt scan the directories for new files, I just wrote up a plugin to allow importing files from the web servers filesystem into the WordPress uploads system.

It simply allows you to select files, and then import them into the uploads folder(They’re copied).

It needs more work obviously, And i’ll have to add some logic to detect that its adding a file from within the uploads folder to prevent duplication i guess.. Another function that i’d like to add is a watch-directory, Any files which get uploaded into that folder, get imported automatically (and optionally deleted from the source dir afterwards), But thats all for the next release in another week or so most likely.

It is a work in progress, as all great things are. Already this is going to make a lot of people happy!

Very soon we will release WordPress 2.5, and about the same time WordPress.com will be updated.

With Safari 3 and WordPress 2.5 you should finally have a great experience if Safari is your preferred browser.

Supporting WordPressing is explicitly discussed in Surfin’ Safari Ten New Things in WebKit 3: “1. Enhanced Rich Text Editing”, “We now have support from web applications like WordPress…”.

But that is only half of story. With WordPress 2.5, we have upgraded WordPress’s visual editor to the much anticipated TinyMCE 3 — yes, 3 is very auspicious number.

The TinyMCE team only released TinyMCE 3 in the last month. This is the first release with full support for Safari (3). Thanks to Andrew Ozz’s generosity, with the support of Johan Spocke Sörlin and the rest of the TinyMCE team, we were quickly able to integrate it into WordPress 2.5 and fix problems as they have been identified.

The dreaded bug where all of your paragraphs would become one continuous jumble of text has been fixed.

If anything about the development version of WordPress (soon to be released as WordPress 2.5) isn’t working well with Safari 3, it’s now open season on reporting the bugs to us at WordPress, and we can work on figuring if they are ours, Moxiecode’s, or Apple’s.

As my friends know, when on Windows, I’ve been enthusiastically using Safari on Windows as my secondary browser since August.

The secretive Apple Corporation is not known for having dialogs with its customers — it is known for letting its products do the talking. Nor is Apple known for being an open source participant — the parts of its systems that are open source, and often shared with a, “Here’s the source, do what you want with it. No, we won’t tell you what’s coming next.”

Surfin’ Safari, with its great content, discussions continuing in the comments, and developer community participation seems to show a different, and much appreciated by me, side of Apple. But any questions about future Apple will go unanswered, like when will Safari for Windows be updated next or released?

Surfin’ Safari wasn’t always powered by WordPress, but it has always been powered by browser building legend David Hyatt and his ability to keep us all updated and interested.

He has long done much of the design work on WordPress.org, WordPress.com, and the sites for most of our other projects.

Over the couple of weeks, I’ve noticed a large number of image and CSS WordPress development tickets (with fixes!) from iammattthomas. I don’t remember him being so involved in a release previously, so I asked him:

I’d never so much as submitted a ticket before Feb. 18. But I knew it was going to take a lot of OCD-level tweaking to get the admin to match as perfectly as possible the Happy Cog designs, so I jumped in. The only downside of that is now I’m simultaneously redesigning WordPress.org while constantly writing patches for the admin UI.

MT has great taste, is fun to work with, and is a wonderful person. I’m so happy he’s on my team!

During development of WordPress 2.3 and since, Jacob has emerged as a core contributor to WordPress development. WordPress 2.5 will be as much his as anyone’s. He has:

• Almost single handedly added phpdoc inline documentation to WordPress code, making it much more friendly to people just getting started with WordPress development.
• Constantly triaging WordPress bug reports.
• A lot of insights into the works and optimizations of PHP
• WordPress Function Documentation Progress

Pretty sweet huh. Jacob is a WordPress Hero and inspires me every day!