You may be wondering about the radio silence. Well, it has been for the very best of reasons. My son William John Budd was born one month ago on Monday, April 7 after a long weekend of work for him and his mom Julia.
Life is extraordinary! Every single time I hold William, I marvel that every little part of him is just like us, a bit of us, but in miniature and developing quickly. He is my son.
My life has new meaning!
The first Victoria DemoCamp is tomorrow 5.30pm, Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 @ 834 Johnson St. (Juliet Living Demo Space, a.k.a. the OLD peacock billiards place). DemoCamp is basically a hipster geek term for people coming together to give demonstrates (or presentations) (practice) on technology products or services (only needs to be loosely related to tech).
Everyday it seems I get an email saying that someone is following me on Twitter. I’ve resisted using any of Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and Facebook status tools… much.
Now, I’m taking another look. Why? Because of the WordPress Prologue Theme.
This morning at WordPress 2.5 release was released live at WordCamp Dallas! So gitty up and upgrade!
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’ve been corresponding lately with a software developer in a large corporation whose work email email signature ends:
“If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.” — Anonymous
I laugh every time I see it, because of the possible arrogance of it, and the reflection of the competitive spirit at the center of our culture, as opposed to a collaborative spirit.
I just received an email that our application to the Google Summer of Code has been accepted!
Our baby joins us a little more each day.
Today, Julia is one month away from her due date, and today was Julia’s last day of work. Of course, the baby has its own clock.
For both of us, baby’s arrival has lately seemed… more real, and anticipated. We are enjoying the process of preparing for baby, and we are both incredibly both nervous and excited.
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.
The Google Summer of Code is here again. I submitted our WordPress application today. Last year was awesome, and I think this year will be even way better!
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