Earth911 Blog

I’ve been representing us at WordCamp San Francisco, which is not a chore by any means. Not only is it bigger this year and in a better facility, but I’ve learned a lot about how the upgrade path is going to get easier, and how to use Greasemonkey scripts if we are on WordPress.com and don’t have access to plug-ins. I’m very proud that Earth911 uses WordPress as a platform for both the site and the blog. I feel like it’s the right place for us to be.

Now I’m just marking time through the presentation on upgrading, which is very technical and for developers, waiting for Matt to talk about “The Future of the Word.”

He’s on!

He says,,,the state of the Word is..Strong.

Last year, WordPress did eleven releases. They like to get new releases into the hands of users asap. So they do about three major releases a year. Which is tough when almost everyone is a volunteer. People contribute patches and code.

WordPress did 11 million downloads last year on the WordPress.org site. Other social tools are growing, but not at the expense of blogging. 6.5 billion pageviews on WordPress.com last year.

There were fourteen WordCamps this year, all over the world.

70,000 installs already of the WordPress iPhone app, and 154 reviews.

They will do mobile apps for most of the upcoming phones.

There is now an official theme directory, as well as an official plugin directory. When a plugin runs inside WordPress it has access to everything WordPress does. It is completely distributed. The top ten plugins: Forms, polls, auto upgrade, stats, nextgen-gallery, google sitemap generator, all-in-one SEOpack, Akismet. Most blogs have 5 active plugins.

Themes for WordPress for 2009:

Updates are important because WP is being used as a platform. Three ways to help people update: through the community,  through web hosts, in-core

Security is also important. WordPress.com is on each layer of the Internet. Even the Department of Homeland Security is blogging on WordPress. Lots of people are looking at the code, and therefore all the bugs are shallow. But some of the really popular plugins have problems.

Media. WordPress hopes to be a hub for media. You can safely store your media because it is open source software and will live on.

And then they are going to release BuddyPress, which will be a social network in a box.

AND: Cooler shwag, better themes, tighter feedback loop.

I just love this guy!

If you use Earth911 and you like it, now you know why.