Matt Mullenweg: the man who changed the blogosphere at 21

WordPress is one of the most famous blogger engines on the Web. Millions of bloggers use it daily, but few know who the person who created this wonderful free program is. And it is easier to find out: it’s enough to type [Matt] in the Google search system - and its website will appear on the first line. This is the most important Matt in the world: Matt Mullenweg.

The 23-year-old became famous two years ago when the first version of Wordpress was released. He was only 21 at the time, he was born in Houston and just moved to San Francisco to work at CNET Networks, but he soon retired from there and founded his own startup Automattic (a company to handle all things related to Wordpress), as well as Akismet on the development of tools to combat spam blogs. All this happened in 2005.

Matt Mullenweg is also the author of the well-known Ping-O-Matic program, which pings the search engines every time a user publishes a new blog post.
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Despite the relatively young age, Matt Mullenweg has already become a real celebrity. A great interview has been published on the Digital Web site, where he explains what prompted him to write his own blogging engine.

Matt says that he first tried working with Movable Type, but then switched to b2 / cafelog, because he liked the PHP and MySQL combination more than Perl and BDB. The transition was excellent, and he really liked the new engine. But the problem was that the development of b2 then stopped. However, after some time, the author of this program did get in touch, and with it Matt began developing a new system, which was later called WordPress.

After the appearance of the new engine, many bloggers switched from Movable Type to WordPress. One of the reasons is that shortly before this, Six Apart changed the license under which the Movable Type: system was used, the conditions for using the free version became more stringent. Naturally, many users have a question: if the company has changed the conditions now, what prevents it from doing this trick again? For example, make the program paid? In general, thousands of bloggers suddenly realized that using proprietary software was dangerous and switched to the WordPress platform, which is distributed under the free GNU license.

When asked why he decided to publish his program under an open license, Matt Mullenweg replies like this: “If you do something for money, then it ends with a sale. Do what you love, what you cannot do, and the money will come. ”

Matt still continues to improve his program, but he does it very carefully. Every time he modifies a line of code in WordPress, he sends a detailed description of at least 80 programmers who have the right to express their opinion. The open source code of the program is laid out for universal consideration, and a fee is paid for finding errors in it.

In the near future, WordPress 1.3 is expected to be released with a lot of new features and improvements. The only wrong thing about this release is its number, because the number 2.0 would be fairer. In addition, an improved multiplayer version of WordPress MU, which is a hybrid TypePad / Livejournal, will be released soon.

Full text of the interview