WordPress 2.1: Smooth, smooth aftertaste

I continue to be thrilled by the WordPress community. The open source blogging application is by far the best project software I’ve ever used. It still is in need of some help in the administrative toolbox, but I am confident developments will continue to improve quickly as more and more people make use of it.

WordPress was introduced to me two years ago by fellow HCI grad students in response to my request for input on blogging tools. Amy and I have been journaling online since we changed our names at the end of 1999, and I had invested the better part of one summer (2003) creating a content-management tool that was clearly never going to mature into a useful form. Matt, Erik and Josh pointed to Blogger and Moveable Type, mentioning WordPress as something new gaining some traction. However, Ryan was much more evangelic about his comments:

As an open source purist, however, I don’t like MovableType. For my money (which is no money at all), I would recommend WordPress (wordpress.org). It is licensed under the GPL, which means you’re free to not only use, but to hack to your liking. If you have your own server or web host provider (with PHP and MySQL), I would definitely recommend WordPress: free, Free, standards-based, RSS/etc, community supported, mature software with a “five-minute installation” process, half the carbs, one third less fat, and a smooth, smooth aftertaste.

I’m indebted to Ryan for those comments. I’ve become so enamored with WP I know use it for prototyping, e-commerce publication and as a possible multi-channel future iteration of the Informatics design eXchange studios.

The latest version — characterized by the ridiculously simple install/upgrade — has a number of nice features in it. Tops on my list is the autosave, which will now prevent me from losing even more hair due to suddent MacBook or Firefox crashes. What I type periodically saves to the database for me, just in case.

Also getting high marks is the comments function that will allow me to re-check Akismet for spam. Akismet is the best spam filter in existence because it relies on the daily routine of many bloggers to identify and flag irrelevant comments. This collective intelligence essentially eliminated my spam comments overnight. While I occasionally still get some sneaking in to my moderation queue, I can now check Akismet again before processing. If someone else has flagged it as spam, it disappears. According to the mother ship, 94% of all comments are spam. (NOTE: Akismet has been ported to several other forums, including Drupal, and may soon materialize for MediaWiki and PHPBB. The latter is really needed.)