I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t sad to see a post pop up in my feed reader today that WPDesigner.com is for sale. Small Potato has been a major part of the WordPress community and has developed quite the following. Not only has he been quite successful, but according to the WordPress Top 40, it looks like he has the #1 ranked WordPress blog, including a PageRank of 7.  On a personal level, he has touched a number of lives.

According to Small Potato, regarding the decision to sell WPDesigner:

If you’ve been reading this blog and my personal blog, you know the first and main reason is I’ll be traveling abroad for the rest of this year. Initially, I was hoping I could juggle traveling, maintaining this blog, and continue creating WordPress themes, but that’s more than likely not the case. Because of that, I’d rather hand Wpdesigner.com to a solid team of developers with enough man hours and better management skills to do this site justice.

Second reason is I’m at a crossroad in life. In the last two months, I changed my love and family lives. Now, it’s time to make career choices; I don’t have to, but I want to make a change. Although I still have the desire to compete with fellow WordPress theme authors, I would love to have the time and opportunities to explore and actually get away from the computer (my lower back acts like it’s 90 years old, but it’s actually 21). Letting go of Wpdesigner, sadly, will leave room for me to do that. (I’ll probably become a fisherman at one of the Thailand islands. I kid. I kid.)

Third reason is I don’t like giving theme support. Hahaha.

The website developer in me says “Wow, what an incredible domain name and great price for an established site,” but truthfully I am saddened by this news. When I think about people that have contributed the most to the advancement of WordPress, Small Potato is towards the top of that list with Matt, Lorelle, and some other great company. He’s always been very helpful and always tended to take a creative approach to things, whether it was his blog, theme club, or whatever else.

Small Potato, best of luck to you in your travels. The next owner has a lot to live up to!

According to word on the cyberstreet, WordPress 2.5 is due to be released this Monday.   This comes on the heels of a possible vulnerability found with WordPress 2.3.  So, what do you need to do to prepare for a major WordPress upgrade?

As always, Lorelle has us covered over at Blog Herald with her WordPress Upgrade Preparation Checklist.   Here are the first two (and probably the most obvious ones):

1. Check Compatibilities: Visit the WordPress Codex and check the WordPress Theme Compatibilities and WordPress Plugin Compatibilities lists to ensure that the Theme and Plugins you are using will work with the new version. If there is a Plugin your blog is dependent upon, check with the author to ensure you have the updated version.
2. Update Themes and Plugins: The Migrating Plugins and Themes offers tips on updating your Plugin or Theme for the latest version of WordPress.

Click over to check out the rest!

Another thing you might want to do is to treat each major upgrade as a reminder to do spring cleaning on your WordPress blogs.  I remove/intergrate as many plugins as possible, remove extra images I’m no longer using, update my Robots.txt file, and check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure everything is being indexed, etc.

It looks like the WordPress team has released what is classified as an urgent security release, primarily to fix a security flaw for WordPress blogs with registration enabled.   It is recommended that everyone make the upgrade as soon as possible.  The release also comes with a few minor bug fixes. 

According to the WordPress team, this could be a pretty easy upgrade, as you only need to override the xmlrpc.php file to fix the security concerns.   If you want all the bug fixes, you’ll need to do a full upgrade. 

As a quick side note, they are also recommending users of the WP-Forum plugin deactivate it until the author is able to fix a vulnerability. 

Yesterday I was excited to see a post pop up in my WordPress dashboard over on Mark Jaquith’s website announcing that WordPress has secured $29.5 million dollars in their second round of financing.   Congratulations to Automattic!  The investor this time is the New York Times so I think it is safe to say that they are doing something right.

While it may not seem like $29.5 million will go very far in today’s world, when you consider that they’ve gotten by on only $1.1 million since 2006, it somehow seems like a much bigger number.  

So what does this mean for WordPress?  It looks like Automattic currently has 17 employees.   If I was a betting man, I would bet the house that they will be hiring soon.   These employees can be used not only towards improving the WordPress software, but can also be applied towards improving the WordPress Codex, forums, or improving their efforts against fighting spam. 

Want to know more?  You can get more directly from Matt.

Today I ran across an interesting discussion happening over at one of my favorite WordPress blogs, WPCandy, that I figured I would mention over here.   

The discussion is regarding trademarking, and the use of “WordPress” in your domain URL.   Obviously this domain uses WordPress in the URL, so I have both a fan interest and a financial interest in the discussion. 

First, here is some information from Michael’s post:

According to WordPress.org, to protect their trademark they ask that if you are going to create a WordPress related site not to use “WordPress” in the domain you choose.

What’s the meaning behind this? Are sites that use WordPress in their name at risk? Is WPCandy at risk?

Although they are not lawyers, WordPress still insists that they must make it clear, “so that we protect our trademark.”

In addition to running this website and Slick Affiliate, I also spend a lot of my spare time as an active “domainer”, meaning that I buy/sell/develop/park domains both to generate extra income and invest in my online future.   One of the things you learn very early when you buy and sell domains is trademarking and what domains are off limits.  When you purchase a domain that includes the name of a trademarked product, the company that owns the trademark can take it from you if they invest the time and resources to. 

Unfortunately, when I originally purchased the domain Hack WordPress, I knew about the risk of trademarked domains, but I didn’t realize the word “WordPress” had been trademarked.  Looking back now, I probably should have done a trademark search, but it is to late now.  When I eventually learned that it was indeed trademarked, I went out and purchased a “wp” domain that I am very happy with, should I ever have to move this website to a new domain. 

Fortunately for those of that have a “WordPress” domain, I find it very unlikely that WordPress would ever invest the time or money involved in “shutting down” domains that use WordPress in the URL unless the sites were somehow trying to harm WordPress in some way, or were making really good money off the WordPress name.   After all, this product is built upon open source and the WordPress community!  I believe that WordPress fan sites do a lot to help the software and the community that supports the software, so it probably would not be in their best interests to remove them.  We promote the WordPress product for free and help generate both interest and support for their product.   

Overall, I believe this statement is more a legal precaution to protect them in situations where they would need to enforce this.  The only thing I worry about is a major corporation such as Google/Yahoo/Microsoft acquiring WordPress, because they have been known to pursue fan sites violating trademarks.

What is your take on this issue?

Back in November, it was announced that WordPress 2.4 would be delayed, moving its expected arrival date to January 24, 2008. Now it looks like it won’t be arriving at all.

According to several sources, it looks like the team wants to avoid a rushed release and instead focus on the March deadline for WordPress 2.5. As a result, we will not see a WordPress 2.4 at all, but instead move straight to WordPress 2.5.

It looks like in addition to the (unanticipated) new admin panel and security updates, we can expect some significant changes to the WordPress codebase. Due to the delay, I think this is a good move. I’m not a fan of rushed releases, so a little extra wait doesn’t bother me.