Category Archives: WordPress

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

WordPress and Dreamhost

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:

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this!

New Interview on Digital Web

There’s a new interview with me up on Digital Web that covers a lot of ground. The questions come from the lovely Meryl. As it tends to work in these things, most of the answers are actually a few months old, for instance it’s all from before I announced I’d be working at CNET. This is mostly my fault because I got so swamped after the move I didn’t have a chance to sync up with Meryl again. I’m willing to try something a little different though, something along the lines of the old Under the Iron model. If you have any questions you’d like to ask just leave them in the comments section for the article and I’ll do my best to answer everything there. Blogging is all about empowerment, right?

Apple WordPress Weblog

It’s been all over, but I’m finally getting to check out the new new Apple education weblog which, coincidentally, is run by WordPress. I would like to thank the people who emailed me about this, in chronological order: Mike Carvalho, Serge K. Keller, Matt Willmore, Michael, John Roberts, Kyle, Michael Biven, Andreas Mayer, Noel Jackson, Manish, Jasmeet. I need to blog faster next time. 🙂 Update: Within the past two hours they commented out the “Powered by WordPress” text on the page. Before anyone jumps the gun it is entirely within their right to do so under the GPL, which I and the other developers believe strongly in, but it’s too bad as I think that could have been excellent exposure.