WPWeekly Episode 4 – Automattic Secures 29.5 Million Bucks

wordpressweekly1 In this episode of WordPress Weekly, we cover the story of how Matt and Toni of Automattic secured a Series B round of funding for $29.5 million dollars thanks to the NY Times. WordCamp Dallas is right around the corner and we give you the 411 about the event as well as a primer as to what WordCamp is. We also talk about the success that Lisa Sabin Wilson has been having with WordPress For Dummies. WordPress is the top CMS of choice within the Technorati Top 100 linked to blogs according to CMSWiRE and last but not least, we discuss Prologue and what it really is. Saving the best for last is our WordPress Tips of the week.

Panel Members:

Brad – Blogs at StrangeWork.com

Charles Stricklin – The host and producer of The WordPress Podcast.

Julian – CasualRevolt

Ronald Huereca – Contributing author of WeblogToolsCollection.com and RAProject.com You can catch his musings at Ronalfy.com

Stories Discussed:

Act Two – Matt Mullenweg lets us know about the successful round of funding they achieved through investors. Matt also goes on to tell us that he believes this to be Act2 of the Automattic story. The funding came out to be $29.5 million dollars and was ponied up by the NY Times. According to Matt, a buyout or acquisition seems highly unlikely as he wants to take Auttomatic into the future with more open source projects to come along the way.

WordPress Is The Most Popular CMS In Technorati 100 LINKED TO – John Conroy and folks from CMSWiRE put together a detailed list of content management systems that made up the Technorati top 100 Linked To. As it turns out, WordPress took the top spot with 34 percent of the sites being linked to are using WordPress. Some of those big websites include Techcrunch, Mashable, icanhascheezburger, and perez hilton.

WordPress For Dummies Still The #1 WordPress Book – WordPress For Dummies remains the #1 book on blogging at Amazon.com – – it’s been #1 almost since the week it was released in November, and has remained there ever since. Wiley Publishing has completely sold out its stock after only 3 months of it being on the market – – they are completely OUT and have to print more!

For those who purchased the book, Wiley Publishing has provided Lisa Sabin Wilson with the opportunity to provide updates in PDF format that will be available for FREE as a download from her website, and from the Dummies.com website.

What Is WordCamp? – After being contacted via email by a few people asking me what WordCamp was, I decided to do a small writeup that describes what the event is, how it started and what to expect.

WordCamp is a conference type of event that focuses squarely on everything WordPress. Everyone from casual end users all the way up to core developers show up to these events. These events are usually highlighted by speeches or keynotes by various people.

WordPress Video Tutorials – iThemes has a number of WordPress tutorials that are video based. The tutorials are easy to understand and cover everything from how WordPress works to installing Google Analytics. There are also a number of video tutorials to watch if you happen to use the Essence WordPress Theme.

WordPress Weekly Digest For Jan 21st to Jan 27th – More changes that have gone into WordPress 2.5. Some notable changes include:

The beginnings of a new uploader ([6659]).
A new Manage -> Tags interface (#5684).
Performance improvement to the outgoing trackback processing code. (#5699).

WordPress.com Introduces Prologue – For WordPress.com users, you now have a new theme to use called Prologue. Prologue is a theme that was released under GPL and essentially places the functionality of Twitter into a blogging format. This is great for those that want to do group blogs either public or private.

TalkPress – Can Matt Mullenweg do for forums what he has done for blogging? We dive into what little details there are in regards to Matt’s new project and discuss what could end up happening.

WordPress Tips Of The Week:

Jeffro2pt0 – For those looking to easily make their WordPress blog mobile friendly, Mark Ghosh has posted a neat tip that bypasses the need for a plugin and instead, opts to use Google’s mobile news reader.

Brad – Do Follow plugin: http://www.semiologic.com/software/wp-fixes/dofollow What is it? The dofollow plugin for WordPress lets you remove the evil nofollow attribute from your comments.

Ronald – If your plugin has been waiting over a week or two, try submitting a bug report to WordPress. I took the advice of a forum moderator and submitted a bug, and my plugin was approved the next day.