Projects « Automattic (via Mowser)

Projects

The best way to get an idea of what Automattic is about is to use the products and services we’re involved with, as described to the right.

WordPress.com

The open source WordPress package was famous for its 5-minute install, but as simple as we could make it the barriers to getting a WordPress blog were still fairly high and technical. Enter WordPress.com, a version of WordPress that is hosted and completely maintained. Thousands of people every day are creating blogs on the WordPress.com service, which has just begun to explore its capabilities.

Akismet

If you’ve been blogging for any amount of time, you’ve probably experienced how spammers can suck the joy out of managing your blog, and some people spend more time deleting junk than they actually do creating content. Akismet is our way to address this. It’s an adaptive, self-learning spam protection service that has proven highly effective, blocking millions of spams a day with a 0.001% miss rate.

WordPress.org

WordPress is an open source blogging tool used by everyone from Rosie O’Donnell to the New York Times, and WordPress.org is its community home. Development is led by Automattic troublemakers Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Boren, along with community members Mark Jaquith and dozens of others. WordPress has grown from a tiny project to what is by many accounts the most popular non-hosted blog platform out there.

bbPress

Forum software is notorious for being bloated and insecure, and bbPress is pretty much everything most modern forum software is not. Sharing the same philosophical roots with WordPress, the most prominent installation of bbPress is the WP support forums themselves, which have hundreds of thousands of posts yet still are as speedy as can be. All the features you need—like tags, AJAX posting, categorization, modular user system—and nothing you don’t.

Gravatar

A gravatar (globally recognized avatar) is quite simply an image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Plugins

Here are a few of the plugins we’ve written, some long and complex and some 5-liners that hook elegantly into WP’s API to do something simple.

With WordPress.com Stats you can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system. Sidebar widgets allow you to easily rearrange widgets on your sidebar. Blog + Wiki = Blicki fauxML easily converts specific fake markup into full blown XHTML. It also offers an API for adding new fauxMLs. Random Redirect allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion. Close Old Posts closes comments on old posts on the fly, without any DB queries. Admin IP Watcher monitors when someone logs in with a new IP and emails you. No-WWW. WWW checks in, it doesn’t check out. Google Adsense for Feeds puts Google RSS Ads in your feed, make sure you fill in your publisher ID by editing the plugin file. Cache Images goes through your posts and gives you the option to cache all hotlinked images from a domain locally in your upload folder Blogtimes generates a bar graph image showing when posts are made during a period of time. Protect Old Posts puts a password on all posts except for the latest one. WP LaTeX creates PNG images from inline $\LaTeX$ code in your posts and comments. bbPress Integration synchronizes bbPress registration with your WordPress blog. No Self Ping keeps your site from pinging itself. Draft Notifier sends a notification email to your blog’s admin address when a post is written by a Contributor or when such a post is edited. Just One Category will cause WordPress to display on a category archive page only those posts which are direct members of that category. Cap Comments turns off comments when a post achieves a pre-set comment count. Flickr Widget displays your latest Flickr photos. Secure Admin allows you to SSL-encrypt your dashboard. Crypt provides encrypt/decypt functions for use by other plugins. Theme Switcher allows your readers to switch themes. Search Hilite is so when someone is referred from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or WordPress’ own, the terms they search for are highlighted with this plugin. Front Page Categories selects categories to display on the front page. Quiz lets you screen your commentators by requiring them to answer a question supplied in the post before it saves the comment. Batcache is an advanced cache for WordPress backed by Memcached. It’s based on the code that caches WordPress.com blogs.