The new P2 has also been reworked from the ground up so that it can be used as a parent theme and then extended with child themes. Andy Peatling says:

This will allow theme designers to create awesome new theme designs without having to duplicate all of the existing P2 features. We’ve streamlined the HTML of the theme so that it is much more flexible for creating new designs using CSS.

Although it’s not shown in the screenshots, I was told that the new P2 will contain media uploading so that images can be added to posts. This is something that was heavily requested after the first version of P2 was released. For more screenshots and to read Andy’s write up, check out this post on the WordPress.com blog and keep an eye out for the release of the new P2 on the theme repository.

This week I had a unique opportunity to appear at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, to demo four open source technologies — WordPress, Apache, MySQL, PHP — running on Microsoft’s new EC2 competitor called Azure.

WordPress and Windows Azure probably aren’t the first two things you’d think of together. WordPress has been free and open source software from the very beginning, Windows not so much, but we’ve always supported as many platforms as possible and for at least 4 years now you could run WP on Windows and IIS (Internet Information Services).

Choice and competition are great for spurring innovation and better for users and I believe open source software is a good thing even if it’s on a proprietary platform. (Just like we have an open source iPhone application, or encourage people to use Firefox on Windows.)

If you’re interested, check out the full transcript of the keynote from PDC or watch the video of the keynote.

We also created this FAQ in case you had more questions about what was announced.

What did you announce about WordPress at Microsoft PDC 09?
As part of the introduction of the Windows Azure platform, we announced that self-hosted WordPress can be run in an Azure environment on an open source stack of Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Showing MySQL in particular at a Microsoft conference was unusual.

Are you moving WordPress.com to Azure?
No. WordPress.com, which is Automattic’s hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure. Martin Cron from the Cheezburger Network launched a new blog Oddly Specific on Azure, which some people confused with Automattic.

Do you use Azure at all?
Yes, we’ve been testing out their blob storage as an alternative to Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloudfiles. We don’t currently use it in production.

Doesn’t this conflict with your open source orientation?
No. We actually think it’s going to help the spread of open source to have the Free and open Web stack get more support and deployment through Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, which they’re investing quite a bit in. Besides, as I like to say, once you get a taste of Freedom it’s hard to go back.

A free magazine style WordPress theme to show your content on a smooth layout.

BrandNew Folio

Two column, fixed width theme with support for gravatars, widgets and a customizable homepage.

wpClassifieds

wpClassifieds is a free Wordpress theme that transform your wordpress blog into a classified ads site similar to Craigslist or OLX.

5 Travel-Inspired WordPress Themes

Five single column and multiple column themes inspired with some things travel.

Bold Life

Bold Life is 2 columns light, widget ready WordPress theme.

MiniCard

MiniCard is a social network/business card Wordpress theme inspired by Tim Van Damme’s website. The theme lets you add links to all the social networking sites you may be a member of, and post useful information such as bio’s and contact details. It also has built in hCard support and (optionally) lets you offer a vCard for visitors to download your contact information.

New in this release are 2 translations. The Spanish translation is by Omi and the Italian by Gianni Diurno. Please, if you use their translations, drop by their sites and leave a thank you comment! They’ve been very patient with me as I fixed gettext bugs and added new text. Both have blogged about the translations if you need to know more: Gianni, Omi.

The second major feature to go in is an “advanced” section to the debugger. This allows the plugin to check the front page every 5 minutes to make sure everything is ok. It monitors for 2 very rare problems:

1. Very very occasionally, the front page becomes a gzip file that downloads. It happened here once and I examined the cache file. There was nothing wrong with it. It was perfect. I suspect Apache and mod_rewrite got confused somehow but clearing the cache fixed it. The file generated after was exactly the same size as the old one, so no chance it got “double gzipped”.
2. In certain rare cases, where a blog has a static front page, and uses a permalink structure of /%category%/%postname%/, the wrong page may be cached as the front page. Even if your blog satisfies the two conditions above it may not suffer from this problem. I tried it on this blog for a few days and couldn’t reproduce it at all!

Nevertheless, if you’re concerned edit your wp-cache-config.php and add this line:

$wp_super_cache_advanced_debug = 1;

Reload the admin page and you’ll see this added to the debug section:

If activated, it will check your front page every 5 minutes. It’s not activated by default because these errors only happen to a small number of blogs. I’ve also noticed that WordPress seems to randomly forget to run the page checker from time to time. I debugged it and the job simply disappears from the wp-cron system! I’ve no idea why, but reloading the admin page schedules it again.
If you’re still paranoid, set your cache expiry low so at least the cache files will be recycled quickly.

Caching, Minification and CDNs

Oh, there’s a new caching plugin on the scene. W3 Total Cache works like Supercache’s half-on mode but can store to memory as well as disk (like Batcache) but also does minification and supports CDNs. I’ve been asked a few times if I’ll support those features too but I don’t see why as other plugins already have that covered (and frankly, I don’t have time to maintain such complex features):

1. WP Minify “integrates the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.” Thaya is very responsive and fixed a bug I reported quickly.
2. There are any number of CDN plugins for WordPress. I don’t use a CDN so I can’t recommend one but OSSDL CDN Off Linker might be worth a shot. This post on it mentions Supercache plus, a fork of this plugin.

Traffic Spikes and Benchmarks

I really should collect more of these. A few weeks ago Mark Pilgrim blogged about how his book had been republished by a 3rd party and put up for sale on Amazon. His book was published under the GNU Free Documentation License so that’s perfectly legal to do, even if a little unusual as it can be downloaded from Mark’s website and is for sale by his publisher. The blog post generated a lot of interest and a few days later I received a donation from Mark, followed by a thank you email. I’m a big fan of what Mark does, so if it had been a physical cheque or a letter I’d have framed it!
A few days after that he tweeted the following graph. Nice spike of traffic eh? His server held up fine with help from WP Super Cache.

And finally, some benchmarks, in Russian unfortunately but the pages translates well.

• WP Super Cache vs HyperCache vs W3 Total Cache vs MaxSite Cache (translation) shows Supercache doing 106154.90 requests a second, but that’s thanks to using Nginx too.
• WP Super Cache vs MaxSite Cache: Part 1 (translation) shows a tight race between Supercache and a plugin called Max Cache Lite, probably because he used Apache this time.

Summary of changes in 0.9.8:

• Added Spanish translation by Omi.
• Added Italian translation by Gianni Diurno.
• Addded advanced debug code to check front page for category problem. Enable by setting $wp_super_cache_advanced_debug to 1 in the config file.
• Fixed wordpress vs wordpress_logged_in cookie mismatch in cookie checking function.
• Correctly check if WP_CACHE is set or not. PHP is weird.
• Added wp_cache_clear_cache() to clear out cache directory.
• Only show logged in message when debugging enabled.
• Added troubleshooting point 20. PHP vs Apache user.
• Fixed problem deleting cache file.
• Don’t delete cache files when moderated comments are deleted.

PS. WordCamp Ireland is on in early March next year in picturesque Kilkenny. Here’s Sabrina’s launch post. Sign up! I’ll be going!

Related Posts

• WP Super Cache 0.8.4, the garbage collector
• WP Super Cache 0.8.7
• WP Super Cache Developer Documentation

We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

Three cheers to the most wonderful platform I have ever used, and will continue to use, thanks to the innovations and continued development of WordPress by the Automattic team.

What do you think about this award? Feel free to let your congratulations and thoughts flow through the comments form.

Update: WordPress was also named the first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS Software. Read Matt Mullenweg’s Official announcement here.

When I interviewed Matt at WordCamp New York, one of the things I asked him to address is the notion that Automattic commercially benefits from those who work for free. This indeed happens but on the flip side, Automattic gives a ton back to the project and to the community. For example, I think there is a lot that can be said for the progression of WordPress thanks to the resources that Automattic has been able to provide due to their funding. It’s also worth mentioning that Automattic pays a couple of folks to work on WordPress the majority of their time such as Ryan Boren who is always slaving away committing code and Jane Wells who works on the usability front.

It’s not like Automattic hoards the contributions to the project and gives nothing back. Matt said something during the interview that really stuck a chord with me and that is “Automattic is just one member of the WordPress community. We are a huge contributor. Myself, Jane everyone involved tries to give as much back to the WordPress community as possible.” So far, I can’t see anything that portrays the individuals or the company as evil.

Throughout the history of Automattic, they have developed and released a number of WordPress plugins to the community. They have also taken some of their paid offerings such as VideoPress and released those to the public as well. The entire VideoPress framework to be exact. They don’t have to do this but they do so because Matt wants Automattic to be an excellent example of an Open Source based company. Not everything is open because hosted services do not have to abide by the GPL since there is no distribution taking place. It’s also worth noting that Automattic has a system in place now so that when they build in a cool new feature for WordPress.com such as Geotagging they also build a plugin to release for the WordPress.org side of things granted, the release isn’t always immediate.

Verdict:

It’s my opinion that neither Matt Mullenweg or Automattic is evil. They don’t have evil tendencies and they are not out to screw people. If that were the case, I can’t see how WordPress could become the piece of software it is today. So my question to you is, do you think either is evil and if so, why?

We discussed the WordPress HelpCenter, the Carrington CMS theme framework and a little about Open Source business models.

You can download the MP3 file here.

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This is a security release with the same fixes as WordPress 2.8.6 plus quite a few MU specific bug fixes too.

Please upgrade as soon as you can.

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• WordPress MU 2.7
• WordPress MU 2.6.1
• WordPress MU 2.8.1