Microsoft Announces Partnership With WordPress.com | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Announces Partnership With WordPress.com

thenextweb.com

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That article is so terribly written I couldn't get to the end. Here is the story from the source:

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...

Matt has actually been steering Wordpress in a very vendor neutral way. As much as Wordpress is free opensource software that usually runs on unixes, it has always been windows friendly - and runs on the azure platform as a launch partner.

It's not hard to see why Microsoft would want to continue their partnership.

Official post from WordPress.com: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/welcome-windows-live...

I'm impressed by Matt Mullenweg. I think the folks over at Posterous could learn a few things from him.

A quick Google tells me that he's the founding developer of WordPress, but that's all I know of him. Could you elaborate on your statement?

He built on an open source project and built a very successful community and SaaS consumer business around it, starting at a time when no one was using that kind of model.

He is the CEO of both wordpress.org (maintainers of the open source distribution of wordpress) and automattic (wordpress.com). He is the main visionary and final say on all features that are released.

Back in 2003 he forked an old blog tool called b2, then grew it until it became one of the most versatile and healthy CMSs out there.

One of the things that has impressed me most about how he has run things is that he is able to balance the creation of a hosted blogging platform (wordpress.com) while respecting the needs and desires of those who wish to own their own data and operate their own systems (think about facebook vs diaspora here).

I recently had a chance to meet him at the portland wordcamp. He was able to answer both highly detailed questions (why is x implemented this way and how will it be improved?) to big picture questions like how wordpress will continue to develop to compete with the likes of tumblr as well as providing the functionality of wordpress.com to everybody.

Overall he is one of those rare CEOs who is very much enlightened about all aspects of the organization.

Sorry to bust-up the love-in but Matt isn't the CEO of Wordpress.com, but Toni Schneider is.

Also the open source project doesn't have a CEO. Matt is lead-dev at both.

Points still apply though, and Matt should get a ton of credit

When I ran WP on a Windows host, the biggest frustration I had was that so many WP hacks required .htaccess. I don't know for sure if there's a market out there for a Windows .htaccess emulator, but I'd bet there's a lot of Windows shared hosting users that would love to see their hosts provide one.

AFAIK, .htaccess files are strictly for Apache web servers - if you're even using lighttpd or nginx, you're pretty much boned.

That's why I said emulator. I should have searched before posting, but apparently there is already at least one product on the market that does this (Helicon Ape).

I think what I did, when I was using lighttpd with Wordpress, was to look at the .htaccess files that were being used, then translate them (by hand) to lighttpd rules. It requires a bit of expertise in both Apache and in whatever web server you're using, but it's another solution to consider if you're looking to "use" .htaccess files.

Are you looking strictly for mod_rewrite syntax support in IIS?

http://www.isapirewrite.com/

More here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60857/mod-rewrite-equival...

There is a product called (I believe) ASAPII which interprets .htaccess files for IIS hosts. We have successfully used it to run Wordpress on Windows for certain clients.

IIS7 has a URL rewriting module ("URL Rewrite") that can import mod_rewrite rules. For the most part .htaccess and web.config can provide the same functionality these days.

IIRF is a good replacement for htaccess on a windows server. http://www.codeplex.com/iirf

Finally Microsoft decided to stop investing in a bad tool and made a great partnership. Too bad it took many years for it to happen. Hopefully they will make the integration with Live profiles simple, much like what Google/Blogger did. I would love to see Live Gallery features/plugins available for Wordpress.

I was browsing Wordpress.com (their home page) the other day and noticed that the Windows Internet Explorer Blog was using Wordpress.com. That surprised me a little. I figured they'd used Windows Live Spaces or some Microsoft-created blogging system. Maybe they do both?

A good choice for MS as long as they don't try to influence an "improvement" of WP to .NET.

Microsoft has been very supportive of the PHP community, and has worked to ensure PHP runs well on Windows. While they have .NET, they do a lot to make PHP apart of their architecture. This is, of course, a smart business move.

Does anybody think this will affect Jason Cohen's startup announcement this morning that will sell WordPress hosting?

I don't think it will. Jasons's new project isn't just run-of-the-mill WP hosting. It's a cultivated WP environment with a different target than the Windows Live platform, in my opinion.

His plans start at $49/mo. He's in a different league from even Wordpress.com premium.

Somewhat off-topic, but I've switched to Tumblr ... it does posts to Twitter / Facebook automatically, and sometimes you just want to post a small snippet or a picture.

After using it, Wordpress / Blogger seem kind of outdated.

I love Tumblr and I love Wordpress. Tumblr has a lot of great features, but WP is a very powerful engine. Far from perfect, but it is improving steadily.

Now if only Microsoft would move all their blogs to WordPress it would be a complete win. I'm not sure if they use the same platform everywhere but some of their blogs look and function badly.

Why do I feel like my WP blog is suddenly contaminated?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?

I was thinking they'd more than double the security holes.

But seriously, it's nice to see MS on a steadily better track record with open source, and WordPress isn't a bad project. Hopefully it continues that way.

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