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CC Search to join WordPress.org

The WordPress community has long advocated for a repository with GPL-compatible images, and it’s time to listen to that need. CC Search, a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) image search engine, is joining the WordPress project with over 500 million openly licensed and public domain images discoverable from over 50 sources, audio and video soon to come.

I am a long-time supporter of Creative Commons and their influential work on open content licenses, and when we heard they were considering shutting down their CC Search engine we immediately started exploring ways we could keep it going. I am eager to give a new home to their open search product on WordPress.org in continued commitment to open source freedoms, and providing this community resource for decades to come. This is an important first step to provide a long-term, sustainable challenger to proprietary libraries like Unsplash.

Automattic has hired key members of the CC Search team and will sponsor their contributions as part of our Five for the Future commitment. I look forward to seeing the project grow and welcome them to the WordPress community! Will share in a few weeks when everything is live and running on the site.

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Asides

State of the Word 2015

Here is the State of the Word presentation I delivered on Saturday, and the following Q&A.

If you just want to check out the slides, here they are on Slideshare:

State of the Word 2015, WordCamp US from photomatt
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Gallery WordCamp

WordCamp San Francisco 2014

Photos from WordCamp San Francisco 2014 taken by Sheri Bigelow.

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Gallery WordCamp

WordCamp San Francisco Contributor Day 2013

Photos from WordCamp San Francisco Contributor Day 2013 taken by Sheri BigelowKevin Conboy, and Aaron Hockley.

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Gallery WordCamp

WordCamp San Francisco 2013

WordCamp San Francisco 2013 was wonderfully photographed this year by Sheri BigelowKevin Conboy, and Aaron Hockley. (I didn’t take any of these.)

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Gallery WordCamp

WordCamp San Francisco Hack Day

Hack Day at WordCamp San Francisco went really well. Developers from around the globe met up to work on WordPress. Photos by Sheri Bigelow.

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Asides

WordPress for Chinese on Sina

Interesting note: WordPress Comes To Chinese Users Via Sina.com’s New Cloud Service, costs CNY1 a month.

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Asides

Stanford Daily

It looks like the Stanford Daily, Stanford University’s newspaper since 1892, is now on WordPress.

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Custom CSS

There have been a few requests for the plugin that drives the custom CSS feature on WordPress.com. We wanted to clean it up before releasing, and ended up adding a feature that stores the CSS better (in the posts table) and also adds revisions so you can revert to an old version of your custom CSS. The plugin is now available on the WordPress.org directory, free for everybody. Enjoy!

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Asides

Secret History of Kubrick

The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet, a nice article by Tina Daunt.

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Asides

Permanently Deleted

“The WordPress people, as good as they are, don’t seem to ken why this ‘convenient’ and possibly life-saving feature creates repercussions and consequences. Like the Senate, it’s all a game to them.” Permanently Deleted : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits. Hat tip: Joe Clark.

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Asides

CoPress

CoPress Pushes Innovation, Shows Value of Open-Source Platforms.

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Ask Matt

Q&A: WordPress & GPL

In this one we cover the GPL and how it benefits WordPress, why WP is under the GPL, commercial themes, how the GPL fosters innovation, creates value, and affects themes and plugins.

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Ask Matt

Q&A: WordPress & Open Source

This one covers how open source creates ownership, the importance of community to WordPress, the role of BuddyPress in social media, open source and government, and the infectious nature of the open source mindset. Hope you guys enjoy!

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Asides

Automattic Aquires AtD

Automattic just purchased a company and service called After the Deadline, an amazingly smart contextual spelling and grammar checker, and can catch errors even the New York Times misses. It’s now live for 7.5 million WordPress.com blogs and available as a free plugin for .org users, it replaces the built-in spell checker on TinyMCE. It’s a cool story, they were actually rejected from Y Combinator and a few other seed funds but kept at it anyway, and has now found a home in the Automattic family. I found out about the service from Hacker News.

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Asides

qTranslate

I recommended a translation plugin the other day at WordCamp Montreal but couldn’t remember the name. It was qTranslate.

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Asides

AFP WordPress / China Article

AFP: Blogging guru chips away at Great Firewall of China — the Agence France-Press talked to me when I was in Hong Kong about the early days of WordPress.com and our experience with the Chinese firewall. Today we are still sporadically blocked, nothing official but enough that almost everyone in China uses WordPress.org. It’s funny that this story came out almost two months after the interview because I’m wearing that exact same sweater today.

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Asides

BuddyPress for the World

Happy to announce that BuddyPress is now available to the world. BuddyPress is a package built on top of WordPress which transforms WP into a social network complete with profiles, friends, messaging, groups, and even activity streams. Of course it’s 100% GPL and Open Source. It’s built on top of MU (which can be tricky to install) so still not for everybody yet, but this is a major milestone in the WordPress world. Check it out. Congrats to Andy and the whole BuddyPress team. 🙂 Here’s Andy’s official  announcement post and WordPress.org.

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Asides

Wired Joins the Family

I wanted to take a moment to welcome Wired.com’s 12 blogs to the WordPress family! (They just completed their switch from Typepad.) I thought this completes my prediction from January that WP would reach over 40% of this list of top blogs, but when I went to the Technorati 100 today everything has changed! First, they only show ten blogs at a time now (lame!) and second there appears to have been huge churn on the list,so we’ll have to wait until next January to do an apples-to-apples comparison.

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Asides

WordPress CodeSniffer

WordPress CodeSniffer Standard. Helps you format your code in wp-style.