WordPress Publisher Blog

This week I had a unique opportunity to appear at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, to demo four open source technologies — WordPress, Apache, MySQL, PHP — running on Microsoft’s new EC2 competitor called Azure.

WordPress and Windows Azure probably aren’t the first two things you’d think of together. WordPress has been free and open source software from the very beginning, Windows not so much, but we’ve always supported as many platforms as possible and for at least 4 years now you could run WP on Windows and IIS (Internet Information Services).

Choice and competition are great for spurring innovation and better for users and I believe open source software is a good thing even if it’s on a proprietary platform. (Just like we have an open source iPhone application, or encourage people to use Firefox on Windows.)

If you’re interested, check out the full transcript of the keynote from PDC or watch the video of the keynote.

We also created this FAQ in case you had more questions about what was announced.

What did you announce about WordPress at Microsoft PDC 09?
As part of the introduction of the Windows Azure platform, we announced that self-hosted WordPress can be run in an Azure environment on an open source stack of Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Showing MySQL in particular at a Microsoft conference was unusual.

Are you moving WordPress.com to Azure?
No. WordPress.com, which is Automattic’s hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure. Martin Cron from the Cheezburger Network launched a new blog Oddly Specific on Azure, which some people confused with Automattic.

Do you use Azure at all?
Yes, we’ve been testing out their blob storage as an alternative to Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloudfiles. We don’t currently use it in production.

Doesn’t this conflict with your open source orientation?
No. We actually think it’s going to help the spread of open source to have the Free and open Web stack get more support and deployment through Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, which they’re investing quite a bit in. Besides, as I like to say, once you get a taste of Freedom it’s hard to go back.

WordCamp NYC will be held this weekend, November 14th and 15th. It’s a great get together for the New York, and the extended, community of WordPress-loving bloggers and developers:

With an amazing lineup of speakers, over 525 people already registered, and 8 session tracks – there is something for everyone.

Myself and several colleagues from Automattic are flying in for this event, and I’m personally excited to see the track devoted to CMS use featuring case studies of current publishers.

If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s $45 for both days, or just $25 for Sunday. More details available on 2009.newyork.wordcamp.org.

[ Visit WordCamp NYC 2009 and WordCamp.org for other WordCamps happening all over the world ]

The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) announced the launch today of Investor.gov – a site focused on helping and educating investors:

Investor.gov is hosted in the WordPress.com VIP program, and uses a custom theme based on the GPL licensed Vibrant CMS theme.

Be sure to check out the video welcome message from Chairman Mary Schapiro for more details.

[ Visit Investor.gov ]

WordPress was one of three leaders in both rate of adoption and brand strength as measured in the 2009 Open Source Content Management System Market Share Report. The second edition of this report, authored by water&stone and CMSWire, was released today and concludes that three brands – WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal – are dominating today’s market for open source CMS. The report looks at download rates, evaluation and trial usage, and third party support to estimate adoption. Brand strength is evaluated by assessing search engine rankings, Google PageRank, mindshare, social media prominence and reputation.

We’re happy to see WordPress recognized again as a strong CMS option for publishers. The free 96-page report is available at CMSWire.

Source: 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, water&stone and CMSWire (2009)

NASA has been using WordPress for a few years now, and recently the NASA Glenn Research Center launched a resource guide for WordPress development:

The site’s goal is to be “the guide to implementing and using the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) with the NASA Web Accessible (CSS) template design on Glenn Research Center websites.”

With a strong emphasis on 508 accessibility compliance, it’s very impressive to see how NASA has built its own custom theme, and is successfully empowering its team to build feature-rich, accessible, and easy-to-maintain sites.

[Visit wordpress.grc.nasa.gov]

Thanks to Brad Tousenard for letting us know about a new site he’s developed for the University of British Columbia, A Place of Mind:

“A Place of Mind is a web site created for the University of British Columbia to aggregate their content from a variety of online sources like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and blogs. The site is configured to pull feeds from these sources and import specially tagged posts”

The design and creative work was produced by Fjord Interactive and development work done by Brad Touesnard.

[ Visit A Place of Mind ]

Great piece in the The Nieman Journalism Lab about how the Ann Arbor Chronicle is able to produce a top notch on-line only publication using WordPress as it’s publishing platform:

And this is what it feels like: 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from the 7 a.m. check-in with your spouse-turned-business-partner to the midnight bookkeeping.

No kids, no vacations, no car. No office; your only away-from-home base is a former Main Street antique shop that sells shared-workspace memberships to freelance software developers and the like for $100 a month. No novels before bed; there’s no time. If it’s a Saturday and the Michigan team is playing, you can watch the game, but run back to your keyboard during the commercials, okay?

As part of the morning routine, they check their WordPress dashboard for vital stats:

3. Inbound links checked daily. The day before I visited, logs for the Chronicle’s WordPress site reported that it had drawn 277 visitors from a local sports blog, 28 from a local school blog and 23 from annarbor.com, the reincarnated Ann Arbor News.

[ Visit Ann Arbor Chronicle ]

After the Deadline, an amazing next-generation contextual spelling and grammar checker, is now part of Automattic and the service is live on WordPress.com. For self-hosted WordPress publishers, grab the plugin at WordPress.org.

Here is a brief video overview showing how it works:
done

Sam Guzik over on CoPress.org details the successful relaunch of Student Life, the “independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis”, on the WordPress MU platform:

In their evaluation of various platform choices they concluded:

“Although Drupal is also extremely powerful, we found that WordPress’s interface was better suited to a workflow that would begin to allow non-technical reporters and editors to work within our CMS.”

You can read more details about this project on CoPress.org.

[ Visit Student Life ]

Thanks Cátia Kitahara for lettings us know about a new BuddyPress site which is being used to enable and foster debate about various aspects of today’s digital life in Brazil. Built by the Brazilian Culture Ministry, the beta site is now live at culturadigital.br:

The site describes itself as “an open public space destined to democratically create and build a public policy of digital culture, integrating citizens, government institutions, state companies, civil society and the market.” Making use of all the “Facebook-in-a-box” features of BuddyPress, this site is off to a great start and could be a model for other organizations and companies looking to build this kind of community engagement and interaction.

[Visit culturadigital.br ]