We all love our micro-blogging applications. We Tweet, we Tumble, we Pownce (or at least we did Pownce),  we feed our friends. Now thanks to Movable Type we are in Motion. They have released a beta for their new social application, Motion, for licensed users of Movable Type Pro.

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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

The latest release of WordPress is version 2.6.2, released on 08 September 2008. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

Features

• Templating system
• Integrated link management
• Search engine-friendly permalink structure
• Support for plugins
• Support for widgets
• Nested categories and multiple categories for articles
• Trackback and Pingback
• Typographic filters for proper formatting and styling of text
• Static pages
• Multiple authors
• Can store a list of users who visit your blog
• Can block site visitors by IP address
• Tag support

History

b2\cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog, was the precursor to WordPress. b2\cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2,000 blogs as of May 2003. It was written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress. Though WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2.

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package were changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress – causing a marked and continuing growth in WordPress’s popularity.

In 2007 WordPress won a Packt Open Source CMS Award.

Releases

WordPress releases are named after well-known jazz musicians. For example, WordPress 1.2 was code named Mingus (after Charles Mingus).

WordPress 1.5 was released mid-February 2005 and code named Strayhorn. It added a range of new vital features. One such is being able to manage static pages. This allows content pages to be created and managed outside the normal blog chronology and has been the first step away from being simple blog management software to becoming a full content management system. Another is the new template/theme system, which allows users to easily activate and deactivate “skins” for their sites. WordPress was also equipped with a new default template (code named Kubrick) designed by Michael Heilemann.

WordPress 2.0 was released in December 2005 and code named Duke. This version added rich editing, better administration tools, image uploading, faster posting, an improved import system, and completely overhauled the back end. WordPress 2.0 also offered various improvements to plugin developers.

On 22 January 2007, another major upgrade, WordPress 2.1, code named Ella, was released. In addition to correcting security issues, version 2.1 featured a redesigned interface and enhanced editing tools (including integrated spell check and auto save), improved content management options, and a variety of code and database optimizations.

WordPress 2.2, code named Getz, was released on 16 May 2007. Version 2.2 featured widget support for templates, updated Atom feed support, and speed optimizations. WordPress 2.2 was initially slated to have a revised taxonomy system for categories, as well as tags, but a proposed revision led to the feature being held back from release.

WordPress 2.3, code named Dexter, was released 24 September 2007. Version 2.3 features native tagging support, new taxonomy system for categories, easy notification of updates as well as other interface improvements. 2.3 also fully supports Atom 1.0 along with the publishing protocol. WordPress 2.3 also includes some much needed security fixes.

WordPress 2.5, code named Brecker, was released 29 March 2008. Developers skipped the release of version 2.4 so version 2.5 contained two releases worth of new code. WordPress 2.5 saw a complete overhaul of the administration interface and the WordPress website was also redesigned to match the new style.

WordPress 2.6, code named Tyner, was released 15 July 2008. It contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

WordPress 2.6.1 was released on 15 August 2008. It contains several bug fixes. WordPress 2.6.2 was released on 08 September 2008. It contains a handful of bug & security fixes.

Vulnerabilities

BlogSecurity currently maintains a list of WordPress vulnerabilities.

In January 2007, many high-profile Search engine optimization (SEO) blogs, as well as many low-profile commercial blogs featuring AdSense, were targeted and attacked with a WordPress exploit.

A separate vulnerability on one of the project site’s web servers allowed an attacker to introduce exploitable code in the form of a back door to some downloads of WordPress 2.1.1. The 2.1.2 release addressed this issue; an advisory released at the time advised all users to upgrade immediately.

In May 2007, a study revealed that 98% of WordPress blogs being run are exploitable.

In a June 2007 interview, Stefen Esser, the founder of the PHP Security Response Team, spoke critically of WordPress’s security track record, citing problems with the application’s architecture that make it unnecessarily difficult to write code that is secure from SQL injection vulnerabilities, as well as other problems.

Developers

WordPress development is led by Ryan Boren and Matt Mullenweg. Mullenweg and Mike Little were co-founders of the project.

The contributing developers include:

• Dougal Campbell
• Mark Jaquith
• Donncha O’Caoimh
• Andy Skelton
• Michel Valdrighi
• Peter Westwood

Though much developed by the community surrounding it, WordPress is closely associated with Automattic, where some of WordPress’s main contributing developers are employees.

WordPress is also in part developed by its community, among which are the WP testers, a group of people who volunteer time and effort to testing each release. They have early access to nightly builds, Beta versions and Release Candidates. Upgrading to these versions, they can find and report errors to a special mailing list, or the project’s Trac tool.

Sponsored themes

On 10 July 2007, following a discussion on the WordPress ideas forum and a post by Mark Ghosh in his blog Weblog Tools Collection, Matt Mullenweg announced that the official WordPress theme directory at http://themes.wordpress.net would no longer host themes containing sponsored links. Although this move was criticized by designers and users of sponsored themes, it was applauded by some WordPress users who consider such themes to be spam. The official WordPress theme directory ceased to accept any new themes, including those without sponsored links, shortly after the announcement was made. Ironically, the closure of the official site and its consequent lack of up-to-date themes drove many people into downloading themes from unofficial sites which inserted their own spam links into all themes downloaded from them.

On July 18, 2008, a new theme directory opened at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/. It was styled along the same lines as the plug-ins directory. Any theme that is uploaded to it will be vetted, first by an automated program and then by a human.

WordPress native iPhone & iPod Touch app

On 11 July 2008, with the launch of iTunes App Store by Apple, WordPress has also released its native app for iPhone and iPod Touch WordPress app has all the features which WordPress Admin panel have. This app works for all the WordPress.com and self hosted WordPress 2.5.1 or above blogs.

Criticisms

• Several security issues but reasonable turnaround time on fixes. According to Secunia, WordPress still has 98+ security issues as of August 2008
• No built-in ‘Preview Post’ link when writing a post. A link was added to open a preview in a new window or tab, but that has caused its own confusion.
• Not great for large project with a very large amounts (hundreds or thousands) of page (rather than post) content. You could easily outgrow it if your needs grow beyond what WordPress can do. Extendable, but there are limitations. Still very good for small scale projects. Blogging is not the answer to everything for everyone. There are many advantages to making your entire website a blog, but there are some disadvantages to it as well

Latest WordPress Release

• WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” :  December 10, 2008

Links

• WordPress News
• WordPress.com
• Download WordPress

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