Stick around the WordPress community for a period of time and you’re bound to come across a few folks who say Automattic is an evil company or Matt Mullenweg is evil in the way in which he runs WordPress.org. The more time I spend talking to Matt and with other employees of Automattic, the more I don’t understand where these thoughts and feelings of evilness come from. Sure, there is a decision made from time to time that a vocal group of people disagree with but you can’t make the right decision 100% of the time. Let’s take a closer look at Automattic as it relates to WordPress.

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?

I enjoyed my podcast with Jeff last night on WordPress Weekly.

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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WordPress MU 2.8.6 has just been released and may be downloaded immediately.

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.

Related Posts

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

Ever wanted to do something in WordPress but just wasn’t sure how? In my experience this happens quite often, mostly with people new to WordPress. But, even the experts run into trouble sometimes. Today I thought I’d start a series of posts which will aim to explain how to do certain things in WordPress. Hopefully this will cover anything from quick tips and simple little functions, all the way up to more complex custom code and the like. So, stick around and you just might learn something.

I think I’ll kick off the series with a couple simple ones…

• Why isn’t this plugin working with my theme?

  This is probably one of the most common issues I read about regarding WordPress. Sometimes even more experienced WPers can get this one wrong. Now, I’m not saying this is the solution to all problems between plugins and themes. Its just that this little bugger is often the culprit.

  Try ensuring that your theme has <?php wp_head() ?> somewhere inside the <head> section of the document. Also, for that matter, make sure it has <?php wp_footer() ?> somewhere in the foot of the document; Before the </body> tag.

  If your theme lacks these function calls many plugins that manipulate your theme will not be able to hook into the required areas. This can cause many headaches.

  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you may be better off having a coder buddy take a look at the theme for you. Or you can also contact the theme author, if the theme you use was created by someone else.

• How come my URLs are yucky?

  Or, “How come my URLs look like www.mysite.com?p=123 instead of www​.mysite.​com​/my-​sample-​post/?”

  This one is right up there with the previous question. I see it all the time. However, more and more web hosts these days support the “nice” URLs by default without requiring any extra effort. So, its just a matter of going into the WordPress control panel, changing your Permalink Settings and then saving. Unfortunately, we’re not all this lucky…

  The first thing to try would be to contact your web host support and make sure they have whats known as mod_rewrite (or similar functionality) enabled on your account. If such functionality is not available on your web host, and you really need this feature, you may need to upgrade to a new host that does support it.

  If your host does support it and has it enabled on your account, but it still doesn’t work, you can check that WordPress is able to write to the .htaccess file (which is where all the “nice” URL magic happens).

  For WordPress, on Unix-based systems, the htaccess file should be “CHMODed” to at least 666. On Windows-based systems the procedure is a bit different. It can be different depending on your particular setup so I won’t go into that.

  Basically, as was the case with the previous question, you may need to seek help to figure this out. If you don’t have a code buddy, get one! They are really great to have around. Just make sure you buy them a nice gift for their trouble.

• Can I have a link to login to WordPress somewhere in my theme?

  Sure! It’s actually easier than you might think…

  Some themes have a link for that already. But, there are also some that seem to lack this obvious and simple feature. You can easily add this to any theme yourself. No need for any programming knowledge. Simply add <?php wp_loginout() ?> somewhere in your theme and you’re done. Easy right?

  Another nice function along the same lines is <?php wp_register() ?>, which will show a link to your registration page (if your settings allow users to register), or a link to the WordPress control panel if you are already logged in.

  Do note though that by default the link will be output wrapped inside <li> tags. This is so you can include the link in a list of other links, like a “meta” section. If, however, that is not how you want it to be output you can use the function like <?php wp_register('', '') ?>. That will simply output the link and nothing else.

  An example of how to customize that is something like <?php wp_register('<p>', '</p>') ?>, which will output the link wrapped in its own paragraph. Just change the opening and closing tags in the function to make it output how you want. Dead simple!

That’s all for now… I hope it helps!

Do you have a question about WordPress? Want to see it answered here on Weblog Tools Collection? If so, please send us an E-Mail or drop a comment here. Your question just might be featured in the series!

I was very excited last week to learn that WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. This is a landmark for us, as it is the first time we’ve won this award, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS. No small contest, the Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories.

As Hiro Nakamura said when he first bent time and space to land in Times Square: “Yatta!”

In addition to winning in the Overall Best Open Source CMS category, WordPress was named first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. This is significant because we weren’t even in the top 5 last year, and now we’re #2, ahead of Joomla! As is stated on the Award site, “WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.”

Every day thousands of new people are embracing WordPress to power not just their blogs but entire sites and communities without compromising on usability or scalability (as would be the case with a legacy CMS). Every member of the WordPress community, from core developer to beginning user, should be proud to be part of this momentum: congratulations to us all!

New Plugins

URL Redirector

URL Redirector allows you to create shorter URL’s and keeps track of how many times a link has been clicked. It’s useful for managing downloads, keeping track of outbound links and for masking URL’s.

Query Multiple Taxonomies

A WordPress plugin that allows you to filter posts through multiple custom taxonomies

Checkfront Online Booking Plugin

Checkfront is an online availability, reservation and booking engine. This plugin connects your Wordpress site to your Checkfront, and provides a powerful embedded booking interface within your site.

This plugin requires a Checkfront account (available for free).

Updated Plugins

WP Archive-Sitemap Generator

WP Archive-Sitemap Generator plugin generates simple Archives/Sitemap based on your sites/blogs posts and pages. This is not another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a nice sitemap generator.

Twitter Goodies

Twitter Goodies plugin will show your tweets under Sidebar Area (Widget), Post and/or Pages. REFRESH AUTOMATICALLY and you have 5 different Color Option.

Table of Contents Creator

Table of Contents Creator automatically generates a complete table of contents for your site, including pages, posts and forum comments. The table of contents is generated each time the page is displayed therefore ensuring it is always up to date.

Merge Tags

A simple WordPress plugin that allows you to combine tags easily.

Delicatessen

A plug-in for finding out who has bookmarked your posts and pages in delicious.com, as well as the tags they used and the notes they wrote about your pages (if there are notes!).

WordPress 2.9 Beta 1 is now available for downloads. If you are looking forward to test out the new features in WordPress 2.9, head to the development update blog to find links to download and try out WordPress 2.9 beta 1.

WordPress 2.9 is still in beta, you can use it to test it and report bugs back to WordPress development team. However, do not use it on a production blog yet.

Author Info Section

How to Create an Author Info Section in WordPress: Chris has put together a nice tutorial on how to create an author info section on your WordPress blog. I am sure you have seen these in the past on multi-author blogs. They normally tend to be displayed at thebottom of single posts and Chris provides details, code and styling for various features that can be added to this section. I also think this would make for a very nice and simple plugin. So if you would like to set one of these up for your own blog and increase visitor stickiness, head over to the tutorial.

WordCamp NYC was last weekend, and it was crazy awesome to have so many WordPress users and developers together in one place (final numbers to come, but looks like over 700). One of my favorite moments was right at the end, when someone suggested getting a picture of the core contributors (I’d asked them all to stand so people could applaud them when we were doing the closing remarks). Some of them were camera shy and kept out of the happysnap, but here’s a handful of the people who make WordPress what it is.

From left: Matt Martz (sivel), Jeremy Clarke, Shane Froebel (^BuGs^), Jane Wells, Matt Mullenweg, Mark Jaquith, Beau Lebens, Andy Peatling, John James Jacoby (jjj).
Photo by Chris Cochran.

Everything you need to know about WordPress 2.9’s post image feature:  Justin gives everyone an in depth look into the post thumbnail or image thumbnail features built into WordPress 2.9 Jeff already makes liberal use of post images in all his posts. Also included, for the benefit of theme authors, are detailed instructions on how to add post image features to your WordPress theme and create various feature sets around this core concept.