Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, has been working for to expand and integrate the social network features of the BuddyPress plugin ever since BuddyPress creator Andy Peatling joined Automattic earlier this year. While WordPress remains vague about its goals for BuddyPress, clearly, with competitor Movable Type already well on its way to creating an out-of-the-box social network tool, WordPress would like to offer something similar.

Mullenweg writes in the announcement of WordPress 2.7 that the new framework has stripped out the cruft of earlier releases and leaves a “foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before.”

Will tomorrow’s WordPress include the ability to build your own Facebook? BuddyPress is already available as a development release, but it doesn’t look like there will be any major changes or new features to coincide with today’s WordPress update.

But for now at least WordPress fans can take advantage of the redesigned WordPress 2.7 interface which makes managing your blog quite a bit easier.

Of course the last time WordPress tinkered with the publishing interface (in version 2.5), the always vocal blogging community reacted negatively, calling it a step backwards. This time though, you’d  be hard pressed to find someone who thinks the new interface is anything but stunning.

Even better than stunning is the amazing amount of customizations options — if the new interface isn’t to your liking, just hide, drag-and-drop, rearrange or resize the elements until it is.

There are also some very useful new features like the ability to create “sticky” posts, posts that remain on your homepage no matter when they were published, as well as some great new comment moderation tools.

The new dashboard is perhaps the biggest change. In early versions of WordPress the dashboard was mainly used to show the latest WordPress development news. Version 2.7 completely changes that with modular dashboard that’s customizable on-the-fly. With WordPress 2.7 you can even compose a post and reply to comments directly from the dashboard.

Taking a tip from Tumblr and other microblogging systems, WordPress 2.7 includes a bookmarklet that makes re-blogging content much easier — just select something to quote, click the bookmarklet and your post is off, no need to visit the admin page or jump through any hoops.

The revamped WordPress 2.7 also takes the pain out of upgrading. Rather than needing to manually upgrade your WordPress install with FTP tools, now you’ll be able to simply click a button in the admin interface and WordPress will download and install updates for you.

WordPress 2.7 is definitely a worthwhile upgrade, you can grab the latest version from the download page. If you’d like to see the new admin in action before making the leap, check out this video, which offers a quick overview of what’s new in 2.7:

Wired.com

He is the founding developer of the popular open-source blogging software WordPress and writes a popular blog Photo Matt. After quitting his job at CNET, he has devoted the majority of his time to developing a number of open source projects and is a frequent speaker at conferences. In late 2005, he founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com and Akismet. Mullenweg attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts where he studied jazz saxophone. Matt is also a Dvorak Keyboard user.

In June 2002 Mullenweg started using the b2/cafelog blogging software to complement the photos he was taking on a trip to Washington D.C. after participating in the National Fed Challenge competition. He contributed some minor code regarding typographic entities and cleaner permalinks.

Several months after development of b2 had stopped, in January 2003, he announced on his blog his plan of forking the software to bring it up to date with web standards and his needs. He was quickly contacted by Mike Little and together they started WordPress from the b2 codebase. They were soon joined by original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi.

In March 2003 he co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik. GMPG wrote the first of the Microformats.

In April 2004 with fellow WordPress developer Dougal Campbell, they launched Ping-O-Matic which is a hub for notifying blog search engines such as Technorati of blog updates. Ping-O-Matic currently handles over 1 million pings a day.

In May 2004 chief WordPress competitor Movable Type announced a radical price change which drove thousands of users to seek alternate solutions. This is widely regarded as the tipping point for WordPress.

In October 2004, he was recruited by CNET to work on WordPress for them and help them with blogs and new media offerings. He dropped out of college moved to San Francisco from Houston, TX the following month.

In December 2004, Mullenweg announced bbPress which he wrote from scratch in a few days over the holidays.

Mullenweg and the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn” in February 2005, which had over 900,000 downloads. The release introduced their theme system, moderation features, and a new front end and back end redesign.

During late March and early April 2005, Andrew Baio found at least 168,000 hidden articles on the WordPress.org website that were using a technique known as cloaking. Mullenweg admitted accepting the questionable advertisement and removed all articles from the domain.

After a somewhat quiet year, in October 2005 he announced he was leaving CNET to focus on WordPress and related activities full time.

Several days later, on October 25, Akismet was made public to the world. Akismet is a distributed effort to stop comment and trackback spam by using the collective input of everyone using the service.

In November 2005 Mullenweg’s project WordPress.com stopped being invite-only and opened up to the world.

In December 2005 he announced Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet. Automattic employed people who had contributed to the WordPress project, including lead developer Ryan Boren and WordPress MU creator Donncha O Caoimh. An Akismet licensing deal and WordPress bundling was announced with Yahoo! Small Business web hosting about the same time.

In January 2006 Mullenweg recruited former Oddpost CEO and Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider to join Automattic as CEO, bringing the size of the company to 5.

It was discovered in April 2006 through a Regulation D filing that Automattic raised approximately 1.1 million dollars in funding, which Mullenweg addressed in his blog. Investors were Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and CNET.

The first WordCamp conference in July 2006 was pulled together in 3 weeks, in the style of BarCamp, attracting over 300 people to the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. The first WordCamp Argentina event was held on October 31, 2007 in Buenos Aires.

In March 2007 he was named #16 of the 50 Most Important People on the Web by PC World, reportedly the youngest on the list.

In October 2007 Mullenweg acquired the Gravatar service and was rumored to have turned down a US$200 million offer to buy his company Automattic