Though WordPress has been around for quite awhile now, I would guess that a majority of WordPress users are fairly new to the platform (using it less than 2 years).   It wasn’t until about 2006 that WordPress really became widely recognized within the blogosphere.  If you are new to WordPress, have you ever found yourself wondering when or how WordPress got started? 

Yesterday our friend Keith, who is a writer for Weblog Tools Collection, recently wrote about the evolution of WordPress in his post B2/Cafelog to WordPress 1.0.   He chronicles the early years of WordPress (May 2003 through January 2004) and talks about the features that were introduced, many of which we now take for granted. 

I think posts like this are fun, but they also help us to appreciate things as they are now and to see how far both WordPress and blogging has come.   I switched my first blog to WordPress when WordPress 2.0 was originally released.  Within 2-3 days I was hooked and haven’t look back since!   Now I even use WordPress to develop most of my non-blogging websites as well. 

So, how about you?  What was the first version of WordPress you used?  

Just wanted to drop a quick post and let you know that I was recently interviewed by Jean of Cats Who Code and that it is now available online for anyone to read.  If you’d like to learn more about me professionally or personally, click here to read the interview.

I’m not really sure if this is a trend or just coincidence, but over the past week I’ve noticed quite a few of the blogs that I stumble upon require you to setup an account before you can leave a comment.  Anyone know what is up with that?

This is obviously a very useful WordPress feature for blogs that have a strong community built around their website, but I think most people should consider the consequences before they require you to register to comment.  A choice like this could keep truly hinder a new blogs growth or discourage a blogger who isn’t seeing the reader interaction they were hoping for.

As with pretty much everything, there are some positives and some negatives to doing this.  Off the top of my head, here are a few positives and negatives of requiring registration to leave a comment on a blog:

Positives of Registration

• Spam Prevention - Requiring registration should stop spam completely.
• More Options - Requiring registration opens up some interesting opportunities to customize comment appearance, allow you to create profiles, etc.   I’ve seen a few high profile websites do this, but the registration usually is optional instead of being required.

Negatives of Registration

• Less Comments - Some people value comments more than others, but I think most bloggers would find less comments to be a negative as the whole concept of blogging was formed around the concept of reader interaction with the writer.

I personally do not leave comments on blogs that require registration because it just isn’t worth it to me.  I have enough accounts to manage without trying to remember my account information.   I also think things like spam can easily be avoided for WordPress users using tools like Akismet and Bad Behavior, Spam Karma 2, or Math Comment Spam Protection (which we use here).

I’d like to hear what you think in the comments below.   How do you feel about blogs that require registration to comment?   Do you take the time to register or do you just decide not to comment at all?

Once again the fourth of July is upon us, and for those of us in the United States, this marks a paid vacation day the day we celebrate our independence and freedom!

Though I plan to take the day off, I did want to offer a quick note I ran across about WordPress.  I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention a post by Planet Ozh about what WordPress plugin authors need to know about WordPress 2.6.  The post covers changes to both the wp-content directory and the wp-config.php files and will likely force many plugin authors to update their plugins for WordPress 2.6. If you are the author of a WordPress plugin, you should probably check this out.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday!

I think it is safe to say that most (if not all) of our readers are big fans of WordPress.  The flexbility of WordPress is just incredible and still manages to impress me at times. What I didn’t realize is that many major corporations are starting to use WordPress to manage their blogs.

A recent post over at BloggingPro caught my attention because they cite a number of examples of WordPress being used by many online corporations, including:

• CNN
• Yahoo
• Sony
• The New York Times
• People
• eBay
• b5Media

That is quite the impressive list in my opinion and I think it goes to show just how easily WordPress can be integrated into all sorts of existing websites.  WordPress.org is definitely the most popular blogging software these days, but I think it is also competing well against CMS software like Joomla, Drupal, etc.

For those of you that have tried other software like Joomla or Drupal, how does WordPress stack up?

The six month of 2008 is now complete and this blog is celebrating the completion of its ninth month of existence. Hack WordPress has continued to show excellent growth each month, so I like to wrap up each month with our popular posts for that month and also to thank everyone for supporting us through reading, comments, guest posts, and any inbound links you’ve sent mentioning the stuff you find here. It really is appreciated!

Here are some of last month’s most popular posts:

• Turn Your WordPress Blog Into an E-Commerce Site
• What Do You Think of Premium WordPress Themes?
• Maximize SEO with the SEO Sniper WordPress Plugin
• How To: Creating a Print Stylesheet for Your WordPress Blog
• How To: Resetting Your WordPress Password

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank this month’s sponsors:

• SkinPress - SkinPress provides a large variety of website templates, including over 60 free WordPress templates.
• PressBox - Pressbox is a new quality premium WordPress theme that is available with 3 different licenses to choose from.  You can see a demo here.

If you have WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, or other WordPress related products and services that you’d like to promote, we currently have a couple advertising spots available. Advertising rates may be going up soon, but all existing advertisers are grandfathered in at their existing rate for a few months, so now is a good time to sign up! Please check out our advertising page, then contact us if you are interested.