WordPress-ive

J. Michael thinks WordPress is WordPress-ive. “And their website’s Installing and Upgrading WordPress wikis are the sort of Help pages most every open source app I’ve ever used was lacking. They’re simply a pleasure to use. […] WordPress fills a specific need I’ve had since my very first website back in the mid-late nineties, and I simply can’t believe it’s free.”

Blog Census

Is anyone doing anything to replace or update the Blog Census? It still doesn’t count WordPress blogs, two years later, and that there are only 3 Textpattern blogs. Right now at Ping-O-Matic we have a database of over 5.6 million blogs, if anyone has a smart crawler I could throw at that list it’d be great to get a more realistic view of the State of the Blogosphere.

WordPress Translations

Since 1.5 has been out for a few months now it occured to me to check how the translation efforts have been going. We had a ton of requests from our localization community that we addressed in the bugfix releases for 1.5 and we use the gettext translation framework, which (I’m told) makes localization a pleasure. Of course the place to go is the Codex, which has a page detailing over 35 language packs as well as about a dozen foreign-language sites from Hebrew to Turkish to Japanese dedicated entirely to that country’s WordPress community. Also my copy of the German WordPress book came in the mail today and judging from the screenshots it looks pretty comprehensive.

Yahoo RSS Search

Niall scoops Yahoo RSS Search, which I played around with a bit this morning thanks to a ping from him. I got very good results with it. They seemed to spider permalink page HTML, so I would get results from people mentioning me in comments to an entry, but I didn’t get blogroll noise like I do from Technorati. Should be interesting to see where it goes. Should also be interesting to see the spin from Technorati, Feedster, Icerocket, Pubsub, etc in response to one of the giants knocking on their door.

XML-RPC Vulnerability

To clarify for all the confused people WordPress is not affected by the recent XML-RPC problem that lots of other apps were. We use different, more secure libraries for XML-RPC. The problem was discovered by the same guy though, I imagine he was auditing our code and found totally unrelated, which we fixed in our recent release. Of course you wouldn’t guess that from the title, “PHP Blogging Apps Vulnerable to XML-RPC Exploits.” Let’s go down the list: PostNuke – content management; WordPress – blogging; Drupal – content/community management; Serendipity – blogging; phpAdsNew – ad serving; phpWiki – wiki (not blogging); phpMyFAQ – FAQ management. If it bleeds it leads, right? 😉

Import and Export

Marc asks about export in the next version of WordPress. It’s actually the very first item on the list because it got bumped from 1.5 because of time constraints. The main holdup has been WordPress supports rich data like custom fields and slugs, which users love, but it makes a lossless import and export a pain. Most other blog tools have a WordPress importer already simply because it’s a market leader, so don’t think the export will improve portability much, but it should make a nice way to backup and restore a WP blog.