Mike Industries switches to WordPress

Mike Davidson, CEO of the very cool Newsvine, switched from Movable Type to WordPress three months ago, and spent some time listing his reasons for doing so. Consider this the antidote for any WordPress community members who were feeling a little bruised by Anil Dash’s recent article about switching in the opposite direction.

Aside to Mike: are you planning on attending Gnomedex this year? Rumored to be the weekend of August 8th. I’d love a chance to meet you.

Aside to Anil: I swear I’m going to reply to the technical points of your WP 2.5 article eventually. There are a few points that merit correction, and other points that deserve a response.

Engine-awareness

One of my favorite things to do when I come across a new WordPress-powered blog is to type ?s=wordpress into the address bar, which searches their site for posts mentioning WordPress. I like to get a read on what people think about the engine that powers their thoughts. While I enjoy the ones that offer praise and appreciate the ones that provide constructive criticism, the best result is when I get zero hits. That’s when I know WordPress is doing its job: when people aren’t even aware they’re using it because they’re so busy using it!

I’ve heard a lot of Social Media Prophets proclaim that the tools don’t matter, that it’s all about the content and the connections being formed.

Ideally yes, the tools shouldn’t matter. The tools should be so intuitive that our awareness of them fades to nothingness. But as long as ?s=wordpress keeps returning hits, they do matter. In fact, the sure sign that we’ve reached the point where the tools don’t matter is when the statement “the tools don’t matter” is so obvious a statement that no one would waste time making it.

WordPress 2.1 “Ella” Arrives

WordPress 2.1 “Ella” is finally here. It’s been over a year in the making, and I’m extremely relieved that she has finally shipped!

Retrospectively, 2.1 took far, far too long to ship. The development wasn’t appropriately front-loaded, so we were still jamming stuff into it in December. We had a lot of trouble putting a stake in the ground. That’s going to change for 2.2. WordPress 2.2 will arrive in 4 months. We’re listening to user suggestions in the Ideas forum, and we’re going to make some goals early on. We’ll brainstorm and code like crazy for 2 months. At that point, anything that isn’t in will be deferred. Next is one month of bug-fixing, tweaking, and optimization. Then we put out a release candidate and have one month of public testing. And then we ship and start doing it all over again.

At least, that’s the plan.

Until then, go download Ella. We think you’ll like her. There are too many new features to list, so I won’t even try. If you’ve been using WordPress.com, you’ve had a sneak peek. If not, you’re in for a treat.