WordPress.org

Looking for something fun to do this summer? All college and university students around the world are invited to apply to get paid $4,500 USD to work on your favorite open source project this summer. WordPress is among the 131 accepted to Google Summer of Code, of more than 300 projects that applied

We have eight committed volunteers who are enthusiastic to mentor, learn, and make WordPress a little better in the process.

Check out our ideas for projects, or propose your own. You must apply
by March 24. Good luck!

One of the greatest things about WordPress has always been the amazing number of high-quality plugins available for the platform. I believe that there aren’t any more “killer features” in software, there are 10,000 killer features and everyone has a different 20. If we tried to put everything into WordPress the result would be, for lack of a better term, bloated. However through our robust plugin API people have used WordPress as a platform for building almost anything you can imagine leveraging the huge WP userbase and scalable core codebase.

That’s all fine and dandy, but having all these plugins isn’t that useful if you’ve got no place to find them. Even though we have provided development hosting at wp-plugins.org for years, we hadn’t had a user interface to the plugins hosted there, which I think was a travesty.

No longer! Our ever-expanding “extend” section now has a brand-spanking new plugins directory where you can browse, download, rate, and comment on all your favorite plugins. I highly encourage you to go check it out.

For users, this means:

• There is now a central place to find and download WordPress plugins.
• You can get a much better idea about plugin quality and compatibility from the site.
• In the future you’ll be able to get notification inside of WordPress about plugins you use that have updates.

For developers, you now have:

• Exposure to the millions of people who visit WordPress.org every month.
• Free SVN hosting for GPL plugin development at wp-plugins.org. (Like always.)
• Automatic download packages and free hosting of those.
• Statistics about how many people are using and downloading your plugins.
• Prominent links to your homepage, and the ability to specify a Paypal donation link from your plugin page.

As a developer all you need to do to start taking advantage of the new plugin pages is to include a properly formatted readme.txt file along with your plugin.

Props to Michael Adams, Mark Jaquith, and Matt Thomas for making this dream a reality. We hope you all enjoy it and if you have any feedback blog it and link back to this entry so we get the pingback. Happy downloading!

Every year South by Southwest, or SxSW, is a very unique and affordable confluence of some of the most influential minds on the web gathering in the state where I grew up, Texas. It’s actually the first tech conference I ever went to, four years ago, and where I got my start down the path that has led me to where I am today.

Another movement close to my heart, Barcamp, is in full effect here in Austin. Saturday March 10 at 6 PM we’re going to do a WordPress meetup at the Barcamp venue Bourbon Rocks on 6th Street. Unlike many other SxSW parties, it is completely open to the public and doesn’t require a conference badge. There will be food and drinks available, and a live band after we wrap up the meetup.

So come enjoy part of your SxSW evening in this beautiful Austin weather with fellow WordPressers. In addition to the good company, we’ll have an assortment of cool WordPress stickers free for the taking.

Finally if you’re attending the conference part of SxSW Interactive, be sure to check out the following cool speakers who are WordPress users like yourself:

Read on for more »

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.

Read on for more »