Category Archives: WordPress

The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.

Intense Debate Goes Automattic

Automattic, Politics, WordPress, , ,

Some cool news today — Automattic is acquiring Intense Debate. You can read more on Jon’s blog on Intense Debate, or on Toni’s blog, or on VC Mike’s blog.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the product, Intense Debate supercharges the comment section of WordPress blogs and other sites with cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles. There are a few companies tackling this space right now, but I was impressed with how much ID (Intense Debate) has been able to do with a small team, and happy to find that their common platform (PHP and MySQL) would make integration a lot easier.

Going forward, the plan is to keep Intense Debate available as a platform-agnostic independent service, much like Akismet. We’ll start to integrate its features into WordPress core, WordPress.com, and Gravatar as appropriate. For example, comment threading is going to be in WordPress 2.7, but reply by email is a lot easier to implement on a hosted service like WordPress.com. We’re also going to be able to lend our expertise in scaling to the ID team to make sure their users enjoy the same hassle-free speed and bulletproof availability as users of other Automattic services.

Long-term, I think that comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs, and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation. Comments really haven’t changed in a decade, and it’s time to spice things up a little.

We were early in the space with investing in Akismet to solve the spam problem, but now I think the real growth opportunities are in the user interaction and social features across comments. There is a huge opportunity to increase the traffic and engagement of blogs significantly. WordPress.com alone already gets about three legitimate comments every second — more than a quarter of a million every day. I’m excited to see what the Intense Debate team can do to make things more interesting.

WordCamp San Francisco 2008 Photos

WordCamp, WordPress

Adam Tow got some great photos at WordCamp. Update: Here are mine. See also:

What about mine? Not quite yet.

2.6 by the numbers

Themes, WordPress, ,

Now that we’re now 10 days into the release of version 2.6 of WordPress, it’d be interesting to look at a few of the numbers around it.

  • There have been around 23 thousand downloads per day. (Of just the English version.)
  • According to the update system there are 201 thousand blogs using 2.6 already.
  • That’s about 9% of all known WordPress.org blogs in 10 days.
  • The video in the announcement post has been viewed 665,080 times.
  • There have been over 300 themes submitted to the new Theme directory, which launched just 6 days ago.
  • In the same period (10 days) there were 579,871 downloads of 2,527 plugins.

I imagine 2.6 adoption will pick up after the 2.6.1 release — a lot of people wait for the .1 before upgrading.

How are we celebrating? By working on 2.7!

It should be a fun release both for the features we have planned and also because it might incorporate some of the aspects of Crazyhorse, our experimental bizarro world dev branch which we’re laser-eye-testing in NYC next week. (700 blogs are running 2.7 already.)

IE6 Independence?

Press, WordPress

Hot off the news that 37signals is removing support for IE6 in their products I thought it would be interesting to look at the stats from WordPress.com as an update to my previous post just under a year ago. Is it reasonable to drop support for IE6 in a mainstream app?

These stats cover Jan 1 – Jun 30: 787 million “absolute unique” visitors, 1.6 billion visits, and 3.3 billion pageviews. I feel these numbers are large enough and WordPress.com-hosted blogs diverse enough to be fairly representative. All the numbers come from Google Analytics. In parentheses I’ve put the delta from the last time I blogged these stats.

  1. 59.41% – Internet Explorer (down 3.05%), sub-breakdown:
    1. 53.42% – Version 7.0 (up 18.25%)
    2. 46.28% – Version 6.0 (down 17.82%)
    3. 0.14% – Version 5.5 (down 0.14%)
  2. 32.82% – Firefox (up 2.08%)
  3. 4.81% – Safari (up 0.98%)
  4. 2.04% – Opera (up 0.26%)
  5. 0.41% – Mozilla (down 0.11%)

The operating system breakdown:

  1. 89.41% – Windows (down 0.95%)
  2. 7.86% – Macintosh (up 1.13%)
  3. 1.82% – Linux (down 0.37%)
  4. 0.17% – iPhone (out of nowhere!)
  5. 0.10% – PlayStation Portable (up 0.07%)

So as you can see, IE6 users account for about 27% of all the visits we saw. If I were building something for “the internet” IE6 compatibility would still very much be on my radar. Everyone’s users or customers are different, and if I saw IE6 falling below 10% on one of my sites I’d probably very seriously consider what 37signals is doing.

The good news is most trends are going in the right direction: strong growth of Firefox, IE7, and Macintosh, and the iPhone came out of nowhere to generate 2.6 million visits (and another 1.1 million from the iTouch).

Happy July 4th!