April 12th, 2013

Hackers Point Large Botnet At WordPress Sites To Steal Admin Passwords And Gain Server Access

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If you’re running a WordPress site, now would be a good time to ensure you are using very strong passwords and to make sure your username is not “admin.” According to reports from HostGator and CloudFlare, there is currently a significant attack being launched at WordPress blogs across the Internet. For the most part, this is a brute-force dictionary-based attack that aim to find… → Read More

March 26th, 2013

WordPress.com Has Imported 15M Posts In The Last 30 Days, Remains A Top Safe Haven For Nomad Bloggers

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Here’s a familiar scenario: You’ve become bored with the current blogging platform you’re on or it decides to shut down like Posterous did after Twitter acquired it. What do you do with all of your posts? Sure, you could hop from one platform to the other, but you need a safe and trustworthy place to store all of your important thoughts. I spoke with Automattic’s Matt… → Read More

March 7th, 2013

Locu Partners With Automattic To Bring Its Menus To WordPress.com’s Restaurant Sites

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Automattic’s WordPress.com recently added a restaurant vertical to make it easier for restaurant owners to manage their sites and avoid the pitfalls of Flash-based homepages that auto-play annoying music and don’t work on mobile. Today, those sites get even better, thanks to a new integration between Locu and Automattic that makes it easy for restaurateurs to bring their Locu menus to… → Read More

February 20th, 2013

WordPress.com Launches Education Vertical For Students And Teachers

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WordPress.com just rolled out a new classroom vertical that is meant to help educators easily create good-looking websites for their classes. Over the last few months, WordPress.com, the fully hosted version of the popular open-source WordPress content management system, started introducing a number of verticals that focus specifically on certain types of sites, be they restaurant sites, homepages→ Read More

February 15th, 2013

Thanks For The 15-Minute Break, WordPress

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As you might have noticed, TechCrunch went down entirely (thanks to WordPress VIP), sporting a fun “502″ error. If you’re not sure what that means, here’s the skinny on why you might see a 502 error: The server, while acting as a gateway or proxy, received an invalid response from the upstream server it accessed in the attempt to fulfill the request. If you know exactly… → Read More

February 11th, 2013

WordPress For iOS Adds Push Notifications And Comment Moderation

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Automattic, the company behind the WordPress CMS and blogging platform, have today announced an update for the WordPress iOS app which introduces push notifications for comments, followers, likes, posts and more. The update makes it easier for WordPress users and authors to reply to and approve comments from their mobile devices, the company says, as well as keep track of what’s trending on their… → Read More

January 16th, 2013

WordPress.com Launches Portfolio Vertical For Photographers, Painters And Designers

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Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, just announced that it is rolling out a vertical for portfolio sites. This, the company says, is meant to allow photographers, videographers, illustrators, painters, designers and others who want to showcase their creations on WordPress.com. → Read More

December 13th, 2012

Automattic Launches WordPress.com Enterprise For Custom Company And Brand Websites, $500 Per Site, Per Month

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Automattic, the company behind the popular blog and CMS platform WordPress.com, just announced the launch of WordPress.com Enterprise, the company’s latest paid service. For $500 per site per month, the hosted service will give its users a feature set that’s comparable to WordPress.com VIP (the same service we use to host TechCrunch). VIP service, however, starts at $3,750 per month for up to five… → Read More

December 11th, 2012

WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” Launches With A Completely New Media Manager, Retina Support, Responsive Default Theme

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WordPress just launched version 3.5 of its self-hosted blogging and CMS platform. This new version, called “Elvin” in honor of drummer Elvin Jones, mostly changes how WordPress users interact with images and includes a number of smaller tweaks to various other parts of the application, too. → Read More

December 6th, 2012

HootSuite Gets Creative, Now Integrates Vimeo For Video, WordPress For Blogs, And Pinterest Tracking

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HootSuite, now at 5 million users, built its reputation as an enterprise tool to manage engagement on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ — with Twitter being an especially close partner for the Vancouver startup. But as it pursues its ambition to be a dashboard for business engagement across all of the web, and for more than just marketeers and social media managers… → Read More

November 8th, 2012

Automattic Launches Jetpack 2.0 For Self-Hosted WordPress Sites, Includes Free WP.com Image Offloading, Infinite Scroll & More

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Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress content management and blogging platform, just launched Jetpack 2.0, which brings a number of WordPress.com features to self-hosted WordPress installs. The promise of Jetpack has always been to bring more of the features from the hosted WordPress.com platform to those who want full control over their servers and this new version finally includes… → Read More

September 27th, 2012

Website Creation Platform Joomla Debuts Version 3.0, Mobile And Tablet Optimized Thanks To Twitter Bootstrap

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Joomla, the open-source-based content management system that competes against WordPress, Drupal and others in the world of blog, website and intranet creation, has today taken a step up in the world of converged media. The opensource community, which says its platform powers 3% of all the websites in the world, has released version 3.0 of its CMS, which automatically optimizes content created on… → Read More

September 4th, 2012

Automattic Launches Its Own Liveblog Plugin For WordPress

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One of the staples of tech news sites is the liveblog — not everyone loves them, but for folks who really care about the latest iPhone launch, a liveblog allows you to follow along with every piece of news as it’s revealed on-stage. Here are TechCrunch, we use CoverItLive (which was acquired last year by Demand Media), which is okay. Still, as with any blogging product, there’s always some… → Read More

August 2nd, 2012

WordPress Launches Retina Support For Gravatar And All Hosted And Self-Hosted WP Sites

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WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg just announced that the WordPress.com interface and all the blogs hosted on the site are now optimized for high-density displays like the ones found on Apple’s new iPad and Retina MacBook Pro. Through JetPack 1.6, which also launched today, users with self-hosted WordPress sites can also enable the same functionality.

The arrival of these high dots-per-inch (HiDPI)… → Read More

April 11th, 2012

Study: Half Of The Top 100 Blogs Now Use WordPress

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WordPress – both in its hosted and self-hosted forms – has long been among the most popular platforms for personal and professional blogs (and it’s what we use here at TechCrunch, too). Looking at the top 100 blogs in Technorati’s index, a new study by website monitoring firm Pingdom found that 49% of the top 100 blogs now use WordPress. That’s up from 32% in 2009. No other platform even comes… → Read More

March 1st, 2012

Rock Your Launch (Get It?) With This Email-Collecting WordPress Theme

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Although I think you’re better off not hosting your hot, hot beta launch screen yourself, if you simply must have complete control there’s LaunchEffect, a Wordpress theme that recreates the complex process of asking for – and storing – email addresses of wannabe beta users. → Read More

January 31st, 2012

For Those About To Rock, WooThemes Launches A WordPress Theme For Bands

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Woothemes has just announced a new theme for musicians called Unsigned. To build the theme, the company worked with band managers and promoters as well as real, actual musicians in order to make a “rockin’” theme that is both “classical” and “jazzy” with a little but of “afro-beat” thrown in.

The theme includes modules for events, discographies, and SoundCloud comparability for uploading music. → Read More

January 11th, 2012

Appifier Launches New Service That Turns WordPress Sites Into Mobile Apps

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Appifier is a new service, previously in beta, that turns WordPress sites into mobile apps. That’s not mobile websites, mind you, but actual mobile applications complete with push notifications, offline access, Twitter and Facebook sharing, plus a native look, feel and speed.

Unlike many DIY app creators (and there are many), Appifier isn’t doing a freemium offering. You can test out your app… → Read More

December 12th, 2011

WordPress 3.3 Released To The Masses; Includes iPad Optimization, Tumblr Importer And More

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After 14 million downloads of WordPress 3.2, WordPress 3.3 is being released to the wild today. Codenamed “Sonny” in honor of the jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, WordPress 3.3 is available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard.

WordPress, which had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, has a number of new features and bells and whistles, including UI… → Read More

November 29th, 2011

WordPress.com Introduces WordAds: “You Deserve Better Than AdSense”

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Automattic has teamed up with Federated Media to – finally – allow WordPress.com bloggers to make money from online advertising. The project is called WordAds and if you’re on WordPress.com you can express your interest for the program here.

From the WordPress.com blog, including a fair bit of snark directed at Google: → Read More

September 26th, 2011

Getcher Facebook Timeline WordPress Theme Here

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Can’t get enough of that Facebook Timeline? Want to copy it wholesale in your own Wordpress blog? Do you want to support an “Italian boy” named Julian? I bet you do.

We just got this excellent tip from Julian describing the process by which he created this very own theme, the aptly-named “Timeline-wp.” He wants no beef with Facebook and, while I find the adoption of an established megacompany’s… → Read More

September 6th, 2011

SF Port Authority Shuts Down Tech-Hub Pier 38; Boots All Tenants Including Dogpatch Labs, Polaris Ventures, Automattic, True Ventures

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A few weeks ago, we heard that the San Francisco Port Authority had red-tagged Pier 38 — putting up warnings that the space was unsafe. This is a big deal because Pier 38 is something of a tech hub. It’s home to tenants including Dogpatch Labs, Polaris Ventures, Automattic, True Ventures, 99 Designs, EGG HAUS, and more.

While Robert Scoble grabbed some pictures showing just how serious… → Read More

August 19th, 2011

WordPress Now Powers 22 Percent Of New Active Websites In The U.S.

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Blogging software WordPress is announcing a number of impressive growth stats today. WordPress is now powering 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%. And 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress. These stats apply to both WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites.

You can also check out Founder Matt Mullenweg’s ‘State of the Word’ adress at → Read More

July 7th, 2011

WordPress.com Gains Support For OAuth2, Dedicated Developer Portal

In a blog post on the WordPress.com blog, Automattic‘s Justin Shreve this morning acknowledged his employer’s aspirations to turn WordPress.com into more of a platform than a mere Web-based blogging software service.

The company has added support for authentication protocol OAuth 2 to WordPress.com and is debuting a brand new developer portal. → Read More

July 5th, 2011

WordPress 3.2 Released Into The Wild; Downloaded More Than 330K Times In 24 Hours

WordPress 3.1 was downloaded over 15 million times in less than 5 months. But time marches on, and so does the music. Yesterday, Wordpress 3.2, also known as “Gershwin”, was released to the public, and in just 24 hours, the latest iteration of the website and blogging platform has been downloaded over 330,000 times. They grow up pretty quickly these days. → Read More

July 4th, 2011

WordPress 3.1 Downloaded Over 15 Million Times In Under 5 Months

The latest stable version of WordPress, 3.1, was first released on 23 February 2011.

Now, less than 5 months later, the blogging software has been downloaded over 15 million times according to a tweet posted mere minutes ago.

Just yesterday, WordPress parent company Automattic published a blog post, announcing that the next version, WordPress 3.2, will be released ‘very soon’. → Read More

June 11th, 2011

Joomla Quietly Crosses 23 Million Downloads, Now Powering Over 2,600 Government Sites

According to BuiltWith, of the top million websites using content management systems (or CMSes), three systems own more than 75 percent of the total market share: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. (All of which are open source, by the way.)

Many are likely most familiar with WordPress, which TechCrunch has covered quite a bit (and uses to power most its sites, for full disclosure). WordPress is the… → Read More

June 7th, 2011

WordPress.com Adds WordPress, Twitter And Facebook Comments (In That Order)

Following in the footsteps of commenting systems Echo, Disqus and Intense Debate, WordPress.com has launched Wordpress, Twitter and Facebook authorization and identity systems for its own commenting platform, in that order. The blog host didn’t even have the Wordpress.com option before.

Coming before Facebook on this is another albeit small) win for Twitter, who yesterday became the first social… → Read More

March 22nd, 2011

Netflix Shares Soar, Site Goes Down

It’s not a great day for the Internet, folks. Web services seem to be dropping like flies. For several hours today, WordPress.com’s back-end was nowhere to be found, causing several TechCrunch writers to consider writing on legal pads and posting on Craigslist. Some even considered posting on HuffPo. Don’t worry, they’ve been fired.

On top of this, and much to the chagrin of the video-on-demand… → Read More

February 21st, 2011

(Founder Stories) Why David Karp Started Tumblr: Blogs Don't Work For Most People

In the never-ending debate between blogging and micro-blogging, Tumblr usually gets lumped in with Twitter and Facebook on the micro-blogging side. But Tumblr is actually somewhere in between the status bursts of Twitter and Facebook and the long-form publishing of Wordpress-style blogs. If anything, it is more accurately described as micro-blogging than Twitter or Facebook because you actually… → Read More