Matt on Not-WordPress

Earlier I posted a few of my predictions for 2007 to the wp-hackers list here, I thought it’d be worth blogging to make it easier to find next year and also be part of the WP.com prediction tag.

So here are my 2007 predictions for WordPress:

• We’ll do 3 major point releases
• People will start Wordcamps around the globe
• WP will become the #1 used tool on the Technorati 100
• Daily spam will be 10x what it is today
• WYSIWYG will no longer annoy savvy writers
• Several new WP-based companies will start
• We’ll figure out the whole plugin/theme directory thing

Is WordPress the Evian Water of Blogs? I prefer to think of us as the Dublin Dr Pepper.

Kirk writes about why he likes WordPress.

As you can see in our bug tracker, we’re getting very close to the next release of WordPress. Once we iron out one or two more things we’re going to release a beta for wider testing.

Users of WordPress.com should see the fixes and enhancements starting sometime tonight! Make sure to use the feedback form if you have any thoughts.

Andy has the details.

We just added a new feature to the admin bar, the blue thing you see at the top of WordPress.com when you’re logged in.

“Add to Blogroll” does pretty much what you’d expect, it adds the blog you’re currently looking at to your blogroll. It’ll redirect you back to where you were and the link will then say “Remove from Blogroll” in case you ever change your mind.

As always, your links are available as an OPML file if you’re into that sort of thing.

I switched my site to using the default WP template (Kubrick) but with the new custom header functionality Donncha just turned on to “pimp my blog.”

I did a short presentation yesterday (the “dance off”) at Webzine and I was weirding a Blogger shirt because they had just given me one and they have the best clothing of any of the blog tools. Anyway, Niall felt bad that WP doesn’t have any schwag (yet!) and remixed my shirt.

Greg Storey just wrote an article that claims:

In several ways I think WordPress has a lot going for it functionally but in order for the software to seriously gain market share the developers need to recognize that design is needed to complete the product. [...] And if WordPress can’t figure this out their application will always look like the welfare option in blog software.

As this is something we’ve been focusing on a great deal in the new 1.6 release, and WordPress.com users get to interafct with the new interface every day, I’m curious to hear some feedback from the community on this.

New servers are so yummy. We just got started but we already have some new ones on the way to replace the 3 that WordPress.com is currently running on. The details aren’t too interesting, unless you get excited by terabytes of storage, but let’s just say that Dell and Textdrive are my favorite companies right now.