Matt Mullenweg: The Man Who Changed the Blogosphere at 21

WordPress is one of the most famous blogging engines on the Web. Millions of bloggers use it daily, but few know who the person who created this wonderful free program is. And finding this out is simple: just type [Matt] in the Google search engine and his site will appear on the first line . This is the most important Matt in the world: Matt Mullenweg.

The 23-year-old guy became famous two years ago when the first version of Wordpress was released. He was only 21 at that time, he was born in Houston and just moved to San Francisco to work for CNET Networks, but soon quit his job and founded his own startup Automattic (a company to handle all matters related to Wordpress), as well as a companyAkismet Blogging Spam Tools All this happened in 2005.

Matt Mullenweg is also the author of the famous Ping-O-Matic program , which pings search engines every time a user posts a new blog post.

Despite a fairly young age, Matt Mullenweg has already become a real celebrity. A large interview has been published on the Digital Web site , where he talks about 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 bundle more than Perl and BDB. The transition went perfectly, 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 nevertheless got in touch, and with it Matt began developing a new system, which later became known as WordPress.

After the advent of the new engine, many bloggers switched from Movable Type to WordPress. One of the reasons is that not long before that, Six Apart changed the license under which the Movable Type system was distributed: the conditions for using the free version became more stringent. Naturally, many users have a question: if the company has changed the conditions now, then 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 responds as follows: “If you do something for the sake of money, then it ends with a sale. Do what you love, what you cannot but do, and the money will come. ”

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

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

Full text of the interview