Joseph Scott’s Blog

On April 16, 2007 I started working at Automattic, amazing how fast the last year has gone by. As I started gathering up details for what I’ve been doing this past year, I found that in April 2004 was when I started using WordPress to power this blog.

Four Years of WordPress

My first post on this blog was from April 30, 2004, using a beta of WordPress 1.2. First though, a little history.

In mid-2003 I figured it was time for me to get in on this “weblog” thing. Although I’d had various sites on the web since 1995, there was something about the order and structure of a blog that appealed to me. Like many others during this time I took a look at MovableType as one option to power my blog, since all the cool kids were using it (like Jeremy Zawodny, one of the blogs I’d been reading regularly). That didn’t last very long. I went on to try every piece of blog software that I could find, none of them really worked the way that I’d hoped they would.

Feeling that all the available options out there weren’t going to cut it, I started writing my own (another thing that seemly everyone else was doing at the time). I quickly got it up to the point where publicly it was good enough. I used that for months, while continuing to look at other options.

Fast forward to March/April 2004 where I finally found WordPress. It was being actively developed and was easily the best out of all the other options that I tried. And I had installed pretty much everything out there.

Since then I’ve published more than 1,000 posts with over 1,500 comments. I started using Akismet, which has blocked more that 500,000 pieces of spam.

One Year at Automattic

It is amazing that a whole year has gone by since my Friday the 13th post. Fortunately though it’s pretty easy to sum up. This job is freaking awesome!

The people at Automattic are amazing. At one point I had met everyone in the company, which is saying something since we are scattered all across the globe. Since then more people have come aboard, and I look forward to meeting them face to face latter this year.

Before joining Automattic full time in April 2007, I had been doing contract work starting back in January 2007. The result of that work was the new wp.* XML-RPC methods. For the most part I really enjoy working on XML-RPC, though some of the specific APIs that are built on top of it are a bit quirky.

Working on WordPress.com has been absolutely fascinating. The scale and growth are pretty impressive. Check out some of the stats and you’ll see what I’m talking about. We are fast approaching 3 million blogs. Not bad considering we hit 2 million in December 2007, some 4 months ago.

The Future

There are so many ways in which WordPress still has amazing amount of potential. In the social network sphere we are seeing things like BuddyPress and Diso. From the WordPress as a platform department there’s Prologue (which reminds me, I need to get a new version out the door, keep an eye on prologuetheme.org) and WP Contact Manager. Even good old XML-RPC will continue to see improvement as time goes on.

The next year will bring a few more releases of WordPress. What’s really exciting though is seeing how people will continue to take WordPress to new and different places.

WordPress 2.5 is officially out the door. Matt hits the long list of highlights of what is new in the release announcement. This coincides with the new layout at WordPress.rog. Peter Westwood (one of the WordPress core developers) put together a tag cloud of people who contributed to this release.

For the XML-RPC blog client developers out there 2.5 adds four new methods:

• wp.deleteCategory( blog_id, username, password, category_id ) - Delete a category.
• wp.getCommentCount( blog_id, username, password, post_id ) - Provides a struct of all the comment counts ( approved, awaiting_moderation, spam, total_comments ) for a given post_id. The post_id parameter is optional (or can be set to zero), if it is not provided then the same struct is returned, but for the entire blog instead of just one post.
• wp.getPostStatusList( blog_id, username, password ) - Provides a struct of all the valid post statuses ( draft, pending, private, publish ) and their descriptions ( Draft, Pending Review, Private, Published ).
• wp.getPageStatusList( blog_id, username, password ) - Provides a struct of all the valid page statuses ( draft, private, publish ) and their descriptions ( Draft, Private, Published).

To go along with the new status methods, you can now explicitly set the post and page status using the post_status and page_status fields. Like wise the status is also exposed via the various get* methods. One note about future posts, for the purposes of XML-RPC clients we set the post_status to publish when the actual database value is future.

The wp.suggestCategories method has been fixed to return data in the same format that it did originally. I never heard anyone complain about this though, so I guess it isn’t getting much use.

Custom fields for posts and pages are now exposed and manageable from metaWeblog.getPost/newPost/editPost, wp.getPage/newPage/editPage via the custom_fields field. I was really happy to get this in, I think there is a lot of potential in being able to manage custom fields externally.

The mt_allow_comments field now understands the value of 2 to be the same as the value of zero. This was done because other platforms expect to be able use the value 2, so some clients assume that we support it. Now we do, but from the WordPress point of view is does exactly the same thing as zero.

If the field date_created_gmt is provided in metaWeblog.newPost/editPost, wp.newPage/editPage then it is used instead of the dateCreated field. This same field was already exposed via metaWeblog.getPost, wp.getPage. By definition the date_created_gmt field is always GMT, even if you don’t provide a time zone offset or a trailing Z. I’m hoping this will help ease the many headaches that have been brought on by trying to deal with date/time issues in the XML-RPC blog APIs.

If you are a developer that makes use of the WordPress XML-RPC interface, or are interested in doing development work on the WordPress XML-RPC code please subscribe to the wp-xmlrpc email list. Along with various tickets in Trac this is where we discuss ideas and issues for the XML-RPC APIs that WordPress supports.

• WordPress::XMLRPC - search.cpan.org - Perl module for talking to WordPress
  Tags: cpan perl wordpress xmlrpc

• scot hacker?s foobar blog > Notes on a Massive WordPress Migration - Lots of details on how they moved CDT from MovableType to WordPress.
  Tags: movabletype wordpress

• Why Did I Change My Mind? | AlwaysOn - Logic behind MySQL selling to Sun instead of going ahead with the IPO.
  Tags: mysql sun

• ixr - Google Code - Looks like Simon took his IXR XML-RPC library here
  Tags: php xmlrpc ixr

… forgive the imperfections of MetaWeblog implementations around the world.

Daniel Jalkut on why we shouldn’t be worrying about this WordPress ticket.

I love that line.

• State of Utah Elections Office - The number of registered voters in the State of Utah, by county. Just under 1.5 million total.
  Tags: utah vote stats

• The BabelFish Blog, Limitations of MetaWeblog API - Couple of years old, but a good list of complaints.
  Tags: xmlrpc metaweblog

• PHP mail() and The Path of No Return ? All in the head - If you are using PHP’s mail() function then make sure that Sendmail is happy with the From address on the envelope.
  Tags: php mail sendmail

• WLW+AtomPub, Part 4: Categories | whateverblog. - Sounds like categories in AtomPub will still need some work.
  Tags: windowslivewriter atompub

Documentation for the new WordPress specific XML-RPC API is up now on the WordPress Codex.

Bloglines has resisted adding an XML-RPC ping interface in favor of simply polling feeds for updates. That has finally changed with the announcement of a new ping interface. You can find the details on the API documentation page under the Ping API section.