So while Sean was away today, Pete decided to booby trap his desk. Luckily, Josh set up his camera to catch it.

Each year at WordCamp San Francisco Matt Mullenweg gives his "State of the Word" speech. The talk always includes some great stats to show the health of the platform and here are some highlights...

User Suggestions

A number of features added to WordPress in its releases come from suggestions people submit through the WordPress.org site.

• 2007 - 713 (with 36,676 votes)
• 2008 - 931 (with 12,932 votes*)

* Matt is not sure why this number is so low... said it could be a bug.

Development activity

• 2007 - 1,090 commits to the WP repostitory
• 2008 - 2,840 commits.
• 11 releases in the last year
• Added 3 new core developers - Mark Jaquith, Peter Westwood, Andrew Ozz

Download Activity

• 2007 - 2.8 million downloads of WordPress
• 2008 - 11.1 million downloads

Spam Stats

Akismet caught five billion spam comments with 99.925% accuracy.

WordCamps

14 this year with 50-400+ attendees at each.

Features added to WordPress this year

Over the past year the following features were added to WordPress:

• Tagging
• Non-sucky wysiwyg
• Dashboard widdgets
• Update notifications
• Pending review
• Canonical urls
• Admin redesign
• Multi-file upload
• Galleries
• One-click plugin upgrades
• Gears
• Revision tracking
• Captions
• Word count
• SSL support

iPhone App

To date it is estimated that there have been 70,000 installs and 154 reviews. Matt says the installs number is a bit fuzzy though because they don't get the best numbers from Apple.

WordPress.org Usage

It is estimated that there are 2.6 million WordPress.org blogs (a number Matt says is much higher than they anticipated). Of those 2.6 million 1.77 million are running version 2.5.1+. Basically, that means that 1.77 million of those are up-to-date on security patches leaving 800,000+ installs out there vulnerable to known exploits.

PHP

When will WordPress move beyond supporting PHP 4? Currently PHP 5 adoption among WordPress.org blogs is about 65%. Matt says they will look to stop supporting PHP 4 when that adoption percentage hits mid to high 90th percentile.

Plugins - Current Top 10 Plugins

1. Akismet
2. All in One SEO Pack
3. Google Sitemap Generator
4. NextGEN Gallery
5. Stats
6. WP-DB-Backup
7. WP-cache
8. WP-Automatic Upgrade
9. WP-Polls
10. Cforms

Matt says there are an average of 4.9 active plugins per blog

WordPress Upgrades

Matt concedes that there is work to be done with the WordPress upgrade process. Things have improved with the addition of the update notifications, but Matt says they are currently working towards in-core upgrades. Basically, the latest version would be downloaded as soon as it becomes available. You would then be notified it is time to upgrade and with the click of a button you will be updated to the latest version. Until then, he says that as a community we need to advocate that people keep their versions up-to-date, offer to assist those who need help upgrading and encourage web hosts that provide WordPress hosting to keep their versions current.

WordPress Crazyhorse

Matt briefly mentioned Crazyhorse in his presentation, but Liz Danzico's presentation went much more in-depth. More to come on that soon.

Sean and I are at the Mission Bay Conference Center this morning for WordCamp 2008. I'll try to do some posts throughout the day. Sean is picking up where Josh left off as the event photographer, so keep an eye out for his photo stream.

Matt opens things up at WordCamp 2008
Photo credit: Sean O'Shaughnessy

WordCamp San Francisco is coming up this Saturday and I'm pretty stoked about it. Since last year's WordCamp our team has developed projects for some of the biggest brands out there (Sony, eBay, Yahoo), released a few plugins, and developed a site hosted on WordPress VIP. Bottom line is it's been a good year for our WordPress projects and looking ahead things look even better. Look for future posts on how we're stretching the platform even further as a full CMS on sites, using widgets, new plugins and more.

I'm very excited to say that we are sponsoring WordCamp this year. If you're going, find me or Sean and say hello.

The PlayStation Blog, (and specifically how the blog has been a social media turnaround for Sony PlayStation) was featured in this week's issue of PRWeek. I can't tell you how proud we are to be part of such a great program. A huge congratulations to Mike, Josh, Ryan, Shanee and the rest of the gang over at Voce.

Full details are available at Voce Nation

I was asked the following today in regards to a WordPress site:

Is there any way for me to load a photo into an item and stretch it so that it just fills the column but doesn't overfill?

My first thought was resize your photo before you upload it. Then my second thought was upload it to Flickr if you want a nice sized version of your photo. But then I got to thinking… is there a way to control this through WordPress? Turns out there is. I may be late to the party on this, or there may be another way to control this so let me know, but here's what I did. Just added the following line to the functions.php file on the theme:

$GLOBALS['content_width'] = 500;

Where 500 was the widest I wanted the image to go. After doing that it was good to go. Using the "Add media: Add an Image" now within the post and selecting the "Full Size" option will place a photo that's forced to the max available space within the content pane. Not bad.

If you don’t know Dan Lyons you may know his alter-ego, Fake Steve Jobs. Dan Lyons is a technology columnist for Newsweek and the creator of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

Dan decided it was time to walk away from Fake Steve, but still needed an outlet to discuss what's on his mind. We were initially referred to help get things started with a blog, but as we talked with Dan it became apparent we could help get him going with his entire personal website.

We created RealDanLyons.com for Dan to promote not only his blog, but his speaking engagements, books and articles. The site pulls inspiration from his new employer, Newsweek and in the interest of keeping things light and personal, Dan provided us images to use that were not the typical headshot (big thanks to Jeremy for those design skills).

WordPress & WordPress.com VIP Hosting

The site uses WordPress for management of posts as well as pages. We also made extensive use of widgets within WordPress to control the sidebar which changes through the different sections of the site.

A first for us with this project was using WordPress.com’s VIP Hosting to host the site. This didn’t mean much difference for us in the development of the site except we know we don’t have to worry about high traffic days on the site, they do. We still developed the site in a local staging environment running a standard install of WordPress. They assisted in taking things from staging to production and now future updates to the site are a matter of committing updates to a SVN repository. Nice. A huge thanks to Raanan, Nick and Lloyd over at Automattic for the help in getting things up on VIP.

Being a fan of Fake Steve made this a particularly exciting project to work on and if we can be a part of ensuring that Dan Lyons keeps writing posts like this we’re all for it.

See more of our work over in the portfolio.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a new iPhone while out in California last week, so I've spent the weekend playing with that. Coming from my Blackberry 8200 this has been a long overdue upgrade.

Sadly, the launch of the iPhone Apps store did not include the WordPress iPhone App (Raanan assures me it wasn't for lack of trying). While we wait for the app you can always check out this video of the app in action. Some highlights of the app are:

• Works with both WordPress.com as well as self-hosted blogs
• Write and manage posts.
• Upload pictures from your camera and photo library.
• Preview posts from Safari.

It will be interesting to see if/how the app handles accounts for several different blogs. Having a "favorites" list of sorts that would store login info for multiple sites and allowing for one-click login into a site would be great.

Oh, and not to skip over the fact that I haven't posted here in 3 months, I've neglected this seriously (a product of working on others blogs way more than our own) but will be picking back up on regular posting. Got some really exciting projects in the works now that I can't wait to share.

Update: It's here! Check it out at http://iphone.wordpress.org

As seen around the office...

Spuda Fett

Darth Mash

Big Toe

Lego Motorized AT-AT

Thanks to Josh for the use of the new D300 for the shots.

Raanan over at the WordPress Publisher Blog just posted a note about our involvement with the PlayStation Blog (and that it's running WordPress). He specifically references our recent post that took a more in-depth look at the work behind the project.

The Publisher Blog highlights some of the lesser known features of WordPress, interesting plugins and also projects using WordPress (hence the PS feature) so check it out if you’re not already.