As has been reported many places, and sent to me in a dozen emails, Dreamhost have integrated support for installing and upgrading WordPress through their administration interface. For many this is not new, some systems like Fantastico have had support for auto-installing WP for a while now, but the interface was cluttered and WordPress was just one of several dozen miscellaneous scripts. What’s really interesting about this decision is their thought process, quoted from their newsletter:

Why didn’t we make it so you could just install Movable Type itself with one click instead? Somewhat because Movable Type is a commercial product, and they would require us to do some sort of weird registration for all our users with them in order to even install the free version. Also, WordPress doesn’t require “rebuilding” your blog every time you publish. Mostly though, installing WordPress was eleven times easier for us.

Tyler Brekko sent me screenshots from the entire installation process, including emails from the “Happy DreamHost WordPress Robot” and it’s kinda neat. They take advantage of a few structural decisions in WordPress and on wordpress.org to make the process very smooth. You can read a bit in their knowledge base. What surprised me the most was the sheer number of people who emailed me about this, DreamHost must have a ton of users. Here are some other posts around the web about this:

• DreamHost Excels
• @ Switch Case
• @ What Do I Know

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this!