However, the best part of the interview comes down to the final question regarding any potential exit potential for the company. Their response: “Our goal’s not to be acquired“.

True/Slant was also about the author — just as Forbes has been for 93 years. At T/S, easy-to-use WordPress tools enabled our contributors to do what they loved to do: create content. They freely self-published 100 to 125 posts a day, sometimes more.

When you stop to take a look at the development of WordPress over the past few years, it’s hard to argue that most of the improvements have NOT been centered around the author. Just a few author specific features that have occurred recently are: Post Revisions, continually improving media management system, Quickpress, word count, quick edit, reply to comments from the back-end, and although not directly in the core of WordPress itself, the acquisition of After The Deadline. As Matt was quoted in the article, even their acquisitions deal with the author. It’s this dedication that has propelled WordPress to be the most popular publishing platform in use today. Yes, there are other factors that go into the popularity of WordPress but I’d say the ease of use along with the ease of publishing content is a large majority of its popularity.

Strictly from an authors point of view, what makes WordPress a better publishing system than Drupal, Joomla or a myriad of other systems?

We have discussed about exploring GPL and the risks through a lengthy article in the past and whether it is a viable model or not. Though the fight is not about using GPL or not, it is about how the products can make use of code which make use of the GPL license.

Matt has argued that GPL Licensing terms state that if you use a product with a GPL licensing, you have to distribute it with a GPL license too, however, this is not happening with the Thesis theme. Matt is not wrong here, because Thesis cannot exist without WordPress and it extensively uses a lot of code from the WordPress core, for example actions, hooks and more.

Though I am not siding anyone here, I do feel that if a licensing states that you have to adhere to certain things, you should technically and ethically stick to them. What is your take on this issue? Were you aware of it? If not you might want to check a detailed post on The Next Web about the issue here.

Further Reads: More about GPL license here and the GPLv2 license which WordPress uses here.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

To learn more about the WordPress Foundation, visit the official site.

We wish you a Happy Birthday, albeit a delayed one (by a whisker). We hope to see WordPress 50.0 before you turn that age .

To know more about Matt, visit his blog at http://ma.tt/ or visit the Wikipedia page about Matt.

Strategically the most important thing we need to figure out is how to integrate bbPress better with WP more for people who want that — right now it’s easier to use one of the WP plugins for forums than bbPress.

I’ve only installed bbPress locally once to check it out but it’s not my cup of tea. I think the bbPress forum software is aimed at developers since it comes with all the basics to build on or around but doesn’t contain the feature set of modern forum software out of the box. For example, the SimplePress plugin for WordPress Matt mentions is packed with more features than the dedicated forum software. One idea I’ve heard Matt discuss with Sam that I think has a ton of potential is to replace or add onto the WordPress comment system with bbPress. This type of tight integration between the two is what I believe Matt wants to figure out. It would be awesome to have such an easy way to not only have a forum where visitors can start their own conversations, but also leave comments on articles on the blog side of things. I hesitate to mention Vbulletin but it’s the software that comes to mind that takes this to the next level by offering their own CMS with the forum software built into it.

One of the best things bbPress has going for it right now is the work of Andy Peatling. In BuddyPress 1.1 Andy rewrote the forums component from the ground up to provide one click internal bbPress forum integration enabling users to setup forums in a fraction of the time. BuddyPress is gaining traction and as Matt says, has all the ingredients to become as large and successful as WordPress. I think the more people that use BuddyPress, the more that will use bbPress building that community simultaneously with BuddyPress.

Your Thoughts:

You tell me, or Matt. What is the future of bbPress you would like to see turn into a reality? Also, if you use bbPress, tell me why and how.

Image Credit

To get you up and close with the WordPress rock stars, we are starting a community interview series where we will quiz people who have helped WordPress evolve and grow, and we could think of no one better than Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress to start this off with. Here is the interview we did with Matt.

WLTC: First of All thanks for taking the time to do this interview, I
really appreciate it more than I can tell you, here is the first question. What does WordPress mean to you as a co-founder and when you think of it as a individual user?

Matt: It’s always been about expressing yourself online. For me, that’s a blog with lots of photography elements. For other folks it might just be a website that doesn’t look like a blog at all. But before b2 and later WordPress I never really felt comfortable with an online presence, there was just too much friction in the tools and they made it too frustrating to do what I wanted. WordPress exists to remove that friction.

WLTC: Happy 6th Anniversary WordPress. It has been 6 long years now, can
you tell us some of your experiences from day 1 to day 2190?

Matt: One day I’ll always remember is the first time someone translated WordPress into another language, I believe it was a project in Japan. To put this in perspective, WordPress had no translation framework at the time so this meant someone went through every single file and line of code and edited it.

This blew me away at the time, and I believe it also had a big effect on Ryan, who went on to lead the long and tedious work of making WordPress gettext-compatible so translators had a robust and efficient way to translate WordPress.

Today there are as many WordPress users outside of the U.S. as inside, and international is the fastest growing part of our community.

WLTC: How has WordPress evolved in community building, what steps does
it take towards it?

Matt: Everything we’ve always done has been trial and error. I think our problem then and now has been it’s too hard for folks to volunteer around WordPress. People break through the trouble and pitch in, but it could be a lot easier of a process and I’d love to recognized everyone who contributes a lot more, which is one of the ideas behind redoing how profiles work on WordPress.org.

WLTC: The GPL issue has been lagging around for sometime now, can you
provide some views on why GPL is the best way to go forward with?

Matt: WordPress wouldn’t exist if B2 wasn’t GPL — it’s the core of our existence. Plugins and themes use hooks, filters, functions, and core data structures in a way which makes them linked and they can’t take away freedoms from users granted by the GPL, which means they must be under the GPL or a compatible license. End of story.

WLTC: A couple of years ago WordPress was seen as a excellent blogging
platform, these days people see it more as a CMS in addition to a
blogging platform. What are your thoughts, and what steps is WordPress
taking towards it?

Matt: More and more people are discovering that the only limits with WordPress are your imagination. You don’t need bloated, seldom-updated, expensive, or never-backward-compatible "content management software" to create beautiful and powerful sites. I think people are starting to realize this because of BuddyPress and the WordPress Showcase.

WLTC: As a personal question, do you follow developments in other
softwares such as Blogger, Joomla and Drupal?

Matt: Absolutely, in fact earlier today at CMS Brazil I watched a presentation on Drupal 7.

WLTC: What are the core values from WordPress you might want or like
other companies to incorporate?

Matt: That’s a tough one — there’s a lot of opinions and philosophies embedded in how WordPress works that I’ve internalized so it’s hard to look at them from afar. Maybe one of the days I’ll get a page on WordPress.org about it.

WLTC: Bugs in WordPress, how do you handle those? Any advice to people
who want to share their bugs and problems or contribute towards solving
them?

Matt: We squish bugs with extreme prejudice. If you’re not sure if something is a bug or not the support forums are probably your best bet. If you’re tech savvy and know how to file a bug report, then I’d recommend to drop it on Trac. In the Drupal presentation I saw earlier they called it a "do-ocracy" where people who do things get things done, and recommended if there was something that you couldn’t code yourself to commission someone to do it on your behalf, which will probably be pretty cheap (a few hundred dollars). I thought that was an interesting idea.

WLTC: One suggestion you would give to someone starting out as a newbie
in WordPress?

Matt: Check out a book on WordPress, spend a little time clicking around the Codex and on WordPress.tv, and of course subscribe to the WordPress Planet and WLTC.

WLTC: One suggestion you would give to experienced WordPress users?

Matt: Check out the taxonomy system, and Dexter Gordon. (The saxophonist, not the WordPress release.)

Update: To learn more about what Matt and team are doing and planning to do with WordPress don’t forget to check the State of the Art Video From WordCamp SF.

Once again thanks Matt for taking out the time for us and answering the questions, it was absolutely nice to have you with us, we hope the readers of WLTC love it too.

Also of interest, via a review on Mashable, is of a service called Errorlytics. It is a 404 redirect service that lets a website owner track 404 page hits, transparently redirect 404 pages to other content within a blog and/or website and possibly increases pageviews and SEO. They have a custom WordPress plugin for the purpose and the service is free for one domain and 5 rules. Now is it worth it? I will never use it because I do not want to depend on another remotely hosted service for my uptime. There are many WordPress plugins that acheive the same purpose and do it for free. There are many ways to handle 404 pages efficiently and with good results. This service might be useful to those who either do not have the experience to put other solutions in place or are looking to make use of the other features associated with the service. If you have Errorlytics installed, what did you think of the service?

The associated article is more about how the web is magnifying the influence of jon Stewart and others like him in engaging the American Public in online discourse about the political campaigns. Be sure to check out the whole slide show.