Automattic News & Articles

Welcome to the October installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Don't forget that the Packt Publishing (news, site) 2010 Open Source Awards are open for voting as well!

In an effort to relieve writer's block woes, Automattic (news, site), the company behind WordPress, has acquired a content encouragement service called Plinky. 

WordPress 3.0 (news, site) is just around the corner and, as per usual for the popular blogging and content management system, a very rough beta version was kicked out earlier this month. Let's take a look at what team WordPress are -- and are not -- working on this time 'round.

One of the simplest methods of ensuring that your published words don't end up looking functionally illiterate is to use a spell checker. But what if you're in need of a bit more help?

You could pay an editor or make an agreement with a friend to edit each other's work. But you may not be able to afford an editor, or may not have any friends you wish to trust in this way, or may not have any friends, period. Sniff.

Now here's the good news. WordPress (news, site) users gained access to a built-in personal editor in September, thanks to Automattic's (news, site) release of the SaaS-based spell checker called After the Deadline.

After the Deadline was already available for free to WordPress users. Now, Automattic -- a company name that all but begs for a spell checker -- has taken this spelling, grammar and style-checking tool, and released it under the GPL as open source. There are a number of client libraries for interfacing with the tool:

• jQuery API (MIT/LGPL)
• Python Library by Miguel Ventura (MIT License)
• Ruby Library by Danny Tatom (MIT License)
• TinyMCE Plugin (LGPL)

Whether or not you trust such tools, they can be an interesting way to catch awkward portions of your writing, and at the very least make you think about the phrases they highlight. Try out the demo and consider whether such a tool would enhance your open source content management system. The source code is available here.

(And yes, we fed this article through the demo. It had a couple of reasonable complaints, one that made no sense, missed some items we had expected it to mark, and didn't completely choke on the URLs.)

Now on their third beta release, the WordPress team is promising big things with version 2.7. After completing the first round of bug fixes from the beta 1 and beta 2 releases, the WordPress team is making sure that the full public release is a quality release with minimal issues.

The company behind the WordPress blogging platform has just announced their acquisition of PollDaddy.

That’s right, Automattic and the Web-based polling and survey company are now intertwined. Based out of Sligo, Ireland, PollDaddy offers free polls with the option to run more detailed and advanced surveys at an annual rate.

Automattic, a web development corporation, has been making headway with its blogging and publishing platform WordPress, and now the company wants to spice things up with an integrated commenting system by the name of IntenseDebate.

The company recently purchased IntenseDebate for an undisclosed amount and plans on integrating some of its functionality within WordPress for the upcoming 2.7 release.

Every successful mega corporation knows that the first rule of acquisitions is: Why buy one of anything, when you can buy two for twice the price? Or, in Google’s case, why own Blogger in the U.S., when you can also own Textcube in South Korea?

Automattic gets a US $29.5M round of Series B funding.

Alfresco secures a US $9M round of Series C funding.

Sun Microsystems pays a cool US $1 Billion for MySQL.

What’s the common thread?

DISCOVER Magazine, one of the most widely read science mags in the US, had out grown its dated Web Content Management infrastructure for www.discovermagazine.com. Times were changing, multi-media was big and in general Web and CMS technology had moved forward significantly.

After analyzing current needs and taking stock of the Web CMS landscape DISCOVER ultimately selected the open source Plone platform. This is a two-part series where we look at the CMS features which convinced DISCOVER to chose Plone.