A User and Developer conference held in San Francisco, for the blogging platform WordPress at WordCamp, discussed many key issues related to fixing some of WordPress’s biggest weaknesses and new features, as well as its stats from last year.
Founder Matt Mullenwag announced impressive growth with page views growing from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month, has 2.3 million new blogs in 12 months and 35 million posts. Although the new BuddyPress, a set of plug-ins that brings Facebook-like features to WordPress, is of particular interest. Features such as friends, groups, private messaging, status updates, and extended profiles are brought to the blogging platform.
Whereas Six Apart also came up with a similar approach, and recently introduced a social dimension to its Movable Type platform.
Although a noted point made by Andrew Mager which says that BuddyPress isn’t another social network drone, its mission is to be more open source, handle better control of data, give people better choices, and build greater support for open standards. The combination of emerging open standards will have an impact on embedding a social dimension into the fabric of every application.
Further statistics gathered show:
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1/3 of the WordPress page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
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120-160 million global unique visitors per month
The focus for 2009 is on easier upgrades. New features are in the pipeline, including the much anticipated BuddyPress. Also up for 2009 is better control over security.
