“Vague, but exciting.” Thirty years ago yesterday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee submitted his original proposal for an information management system to his boss at CERN — what would later become the World Wide Web (and, it turns out, a huge influence on my life and career). To help celebrate, I tweeted WordPress’s contribution to the web’s […]
Category Archives: WordPress
My TED Video on the Future of Work
If companies don’t try it, workers may force them to do it anyway.
Journalism and Newspack
WordPress.com is partnering with Google and news industry leaders on a new platform for small- and medium-sized publishers, called Newspack. The team has raised $2.4 million in first-year funding from the Google News Initiative, Lenfest Journalism Institute, Civil funder ConsenSys, and the Knight Foundation, among others. We’re also still happy to talk to and engage […]
WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ
Update: On December 6th we released WordPress 5.0. It was definitely the most controversial release in a while, but the usage and adoption metrics are looking similar to previous releases. I’m looking forward to continuing to iterate on the new block editor! We are nearing the release date for WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg, one of […]
WordPress at 15
This weekend, May 27, marks the 15th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. It is an understatement to say that I am immensely proud of what this global community has become, and what it has created. More than 30% of the top sites on the web are now powered by WordPress, I’m writing this […]
Facebook Dropping Patent Clause
I am surprised and excited to see the news that Facebook is going to drop the patent clause that I wrote about last week. They’ve announced that with React 16 the license will just be regular MIT with no patent addition. I applaud Facebook for making this move, and I hope that patent clause use […]
WordPress 14
Today is 14 years from the very first release of WordPress. The interface I’m using to write this (Calypso) is completely unrecognizable from what WordPress looked and worked like even a few years ago. Fourteen years in, I’m waking up every day excited about what’s coming next for us. The progress of the editor and CLI so […]
WP Growth Council
In the WordPress world, when we look back an 2016 I think we’ll remember it as the year that we awoke to the importance of marketing. WordPress has always grown organically through word of mouth and its passionate community, but the hundreds of millions being spent advertising against WP has started to have an impact, […]
Dance to Calypso
One of the hardest things to do in technology is disrupt yourself. But we’re trying our darndest, and have some cool news to introduce today. When I took on the responsibility of CEO of Automattic January of last year, we faced two huge problems: our growth was constrained by lack of capital, and the technological […]
A Bank Website on WordPress
There’s a thread on Quora asking “I am powering a bank’s website using WordPress. What security measures should I take?” The answers have mostly been ignorant junk along the lines of “Oh NOES WP is INSECURE! let me take my money out of that bank”, so I wrote one myself, which I’ve copied below. I […]
State of the Word 2014
Yesterday I delivered the State of the Word address to the WordPress community, and the video is already up on WordPress.tv. Here are the slides if you’d like to view them on their own: State of the Word 2014 from photomatt If you just want the bullet points, here are the big things I discussed […]
Five for the Future
On Sunday at WordCamp Europe I got a question about how companies contribute back to WordPress, how they’re doing, and what companies should do more of. First on the state of things: there are more companies genuinely and altruistically contributing to growing WordPress than ever before. In our ecosystem web hosts definitely make the most […]
WordPress & Techmeme 100
Whenever I visit a site I can usually tell whether it’s WordPress or not within an instant — there’s just something about a WordPress site that is distinctive. Super-clean permalinks are usually a dead giveaway. One thing I’ve been noticing a lot lately is on my guilty pleasure for tech news, Techmeme, it seems like almost […]
3.6 and State of the Word
3.6 has been released and has a groovy video to go with it: It’s been a busy week, WordCamp San Francisco 2013 went off without a hitch. Here’s the State of the Word presentation, which covered quite a bit of material and talks about the plans for WordPress 3.7 and 3.8: And here’s the question […]
This Week in Startups
While at the D Conference last month I did an interview with Jason Calacanis for his This Week in Startups show, which I was actually last on in 2009. We went a little long so it was broken into two, here it is (WP Daily has an index of the questions):
Dear WordPress,
Has it really been 10 years? It seems just yesterday we were playing around on my blog, and the blogs of a few high school friends. Two of those friends are married, one isn’t anymore, two are still figuring things out, and one has passed away. You were cute before you became beautiful. Wearing black […]
Neil Leifer on WordPress
One of my favorite photographers, Neil Leifer, has a beautiful new WordPress.com-powered site. For the past few years I’ve had this photo in my office: The story behind it is pretty interesting, taken from this interview with Larry Berman and Chris Maher: Chris/Larry: It’s actually quite a different question to say what are your favorites verses […]
Radically Simplified WordPress
Had an interesting chat with Anil Dash today at the GigaOM/PaidContent conference in NYC, here are some tweets from the talk: @rosso @photomatt As soon as the next bubble bursts (and I’m quite sure that it will), blogging is going to be bigger than ever. — Oliver Reichenstein (@iA) May 23, 2012 Q&A: @photomatt on […]
State of the Word 2011
Just in case you missed yesterday’s State of the Word presentation, it’s now available on WordPress TV: The slides are also available on Slideshare. Here are some key takeaways from yesterday: We had over 1,000 people attending WCSF and many more watching the livestream, making it the biggest WordCamp yet. The survey of 18,000 WP […]
The TimThumb Saga
Last week there was a serious flaw found in the code behind TimThumb, an image re-sizing library commonly used in premium themes.* Because the code is commonly embedded in themes it’s not easy to discretely update like it would be if the code were a plugin, and even when a theme is updated people are […]