Us self-hosted folk have been control where widgets are displayed for a long time with plugins, but when you’re on WordPress.com, you just don’t get the same features — which should be expected, primarily for security and scalability reasons. One big piece of functionality has been the ability to hide and show a specific widget [...]
Paul Maiorana, part of the WordPress.com VIP team, made the announcement that WordPress.com VIP cloud customers will be able to utilize the new search functionality. I said cloud customers because WordPress.com VIP offers two types of services. WordPress cloud hosting as well as WordPress.org (self-hosted) consulting. Both are at a high premium, but that’s the [...]
The WordPress.org has over 20,000 plugins available to download. Some awesome, some not so awesome. I also find the WordPress.org search functions to not be very helpful, where if it adopted more of a Google style search function, it could be much more practical for people to use. However, I’ve scoured the plugin repository and [...]
Matt Mullenweg caught up with Colleen Taylor of TechCrunch. Matt speaks on why Automattic is not targeting ads for WordPress.com, as well as how they are being successful as a distributed company.
Starting Wednesday, January 23rd 2013, you will no longer have to create a separate Akismet.com account. Automattic has fully integrated its WordPress.com account system as a single-sign-on point (SSO) of access for you to access Akismet.com. As part of this integration, Auttomatic made the decision to merge all existing Akismet.com accounts into WordPress.com and create [...]
In a recent article by Liz Gannes over at AllThingsDigital, she shows off some statistics about Automattic. Here are some key points of the article: Projected revenue of $45 million for 2012 500,000+ paying customers Recently launched revenue-sharing network To date, only 118 employees (world-wide — Automattic is a “distributed company”) Recently, it was announced [...]
JetPack, the WordPress plugin which incorporates a number of WordPress.com features, has released its 1.3 version. It also now includes Grunion contact forms, which is another plugin by Automattic. I personally still love Gravity Forms more than any other contact form plugin, but let me continue about JetPack. The new contact forms included are the [...]
This is huge! Tim Moore from the WordPress.com team, announced today that they are launching a REST API for the WordPress.com platform. Automattic is opening access to some very interesting bits of data. In particular, I’m interested in the data around “Freshly Pressed”, and other tools like Follow, Like, and Reblog. The first app, which [...]
Earlier today, WordPress.com announced WordAds. This announcement stems from the Federated Media partnership formed last month. WordPress.com is making WordAds available in a limited fashion, you can apply here. Given that there are 50,000 new WordPress.com blogs being created everyday, there is simply monumental amount of content being created and now WordPress.com has a more [...]
When Google chose to go with WordPress.com as the new home for Google Knols, it said a lot about both WordPress and Blogger. Firstly, it says that WordPress is more than just a blogging application. So many say that WordPress is only for blogging, or it’s not enterprise ready (read: scalability), or this or that. [...]
JetPack, produced by the WordPress.com team, is a great plugin that lets you add functionality from WordPress.com, directly to your self-hosted WordPress site. Features such as wp.com stats, sharing options, spelling and grammar correction, even wp.me shortcodes. The JetPack team announced the latest release of the plugin and it’s available for download immediately. Here is [...]
Sara Rosso of WordPress.com announced that they pushed out the WordPress 3.3 features globally onto WordPress.com. It does seem pretty evident to me that as soon as WordPress.com receives the next release of WordPress’ updates, that the next major release of WordPress is coming very soon. I have a test site running the latest trunk [...]
In an article by Sarah Perez on TechCrunch, she reports that Google+ will soon be integrating with Blogger. This is the first of many attacks on blogging services networks like WordPress.com and Tumblr.com. This move by Google comes at no surprise to me. It’s obvious that both WordPress.com and Tumblr.com have a ton of traffic [...]
Announced on Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Federated Media is partnering with Automattic to offer advertising to its WordPress.com users. Previously, advertising options were only available to publishers that were getting 25,000+ pageviews/mo. It hasn’t been outlined exactly how the new partnership will benefit bloggers and publishers on WordPress.com, but there is a lot [...]
Jonathan Dingman is a passionate blogger who loves writing about WordPress news, reporting on events, theme releases, awesome plugins, and more. He started using WordPress in 2004 and ran the first WordCamp NYC in 2008.