What better way to celebrate nine years of WordPress than a brand new release candidate? WordPress 3.4 has been in the works for the since the beginning of the year and is quickly nearing final release. Remember, the release candidate phase comes after the beta stage and just before the final public release.

Now is the time to help out by testing themes and plugins. If you find any potential bugs you can share your findings in the Alpha/Beta support forums.

Version 3.4 is bringing a live theme customizer and HTML in captions to WordPress, along with a slew of other improvements. Is there anything in particular you’re looking forward to?

On May 27th, 2003, Matt Mullenweg announced the availability of the first release of WordPress, version 0.7. He and Mike Little became the co-founders of a little project that, in the years since, has made a big impact on web publishing.

A lot has happened in the last year. If you have the desire to reminisce a bit, browse through our post archives starting last May and see just how much has happened since then. ¹ The WordPress community is a busy one!

If you’re in the mood to thank people today, you can thank WordPress co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, the hundreds of contributors to WordPress core over the years, support forum moderators and the theme review team, anyone who has made a theme or plugin that you’ve used, or maybe even the person who first introduced you to WordPress.

And looking forward, don’t forget that Mullenweg has made some interesting goals for the next year of WordPress development.

For the comments below, let us know how long you’ve used WordPress. Have you made decent progress in your career or hobby in the last year? What do you want to see the next year bring? And just think, as Ryan Duff joked on Twitter, about what we have to look forward to as WordPress approaches that “defiant teenager” age.

Matt Mullenweg thinks that in order for WordPress to truly embrace mobile it will need to be re-imagined and simplified radically, beyond “responsive stylesheets or incremental UX improvements.” He discussed the project’s emphasis on mobile, or what he sees as the fourth major phase WordPress has been through, during an interview at the GigaOM/PaidContent conference yesterday in New York City.

Mullenweg laid his thoughts out a bit more on his blog, where he said that he spends a lot of time thinking about a very simplified version of WordPress for mobile devices. The paidContent blog quoted him saying WordPress “is a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR… but that doesn’t work on a phone.”

Regarding what sort of re-thinking he’s talking about, Mullenweg referenced the WordPress for iPhone and WordPress for Android apps. There are six mobile WordPress apps in active development, though optimizing WordPress itself for all mobile devices (in other words, not relying entirely on applications) has been a recurring discussion topic for the last few versions of WordPress.

Recently work on WordPress 3.4 has been done to make the mobile dashboard experience more pleasant, by implementing things like jQuery UI Touch Punch. George Stephanis posted an update to the WordPress development blog not long ago describing some of the efforts being made to improve WordPress on mobile devices. In the development version WordPress is more responsive on smaller screen sizes, and dragging and dropping dashboard elements works with touch-enabled devices.

Mullenweg, however, thinks a more radical approach is more necessary:

How we democratize publishing on that sort of platform will not and should not work like WordPress’ current dashboard does. It’s not a matter of a responsive stylesheet or incremental UX improvements, it’s re-imagining and radically simplifying what we currently do, thinking outside the box of wp-admin.

Pushing to re-think WordPress fundamentals, though, is a real challenge. During the paidContent interview he said “It’s easy to pivot if things are going badly, but when it’s going well you have the weight of all your existing users.”

Nearly nine years now

Mullenweg named the major phases WordPress has seen its lifetime: a simple blogging tool, a content management system, and (the current phase) an application platform. Social and mobile, he says, will be the next phase of the project’s growth. ¹

WordPress will be nine years old this weekend, and version 3.4 will land soon too. Musing on the future, Mullenweg said “I think when we turn 10 in 2013 the ways people experience and publish with WordPress will be shorter, simpler, faster.” So as well as reflecting on nine years of WordPress on Sunday, be looking forward to May 27th, 2013 and what the WordPress experience will have evolved to by then.

Mullenweg said that while he’s thinking about it a lot, he’s still not sure what exactly the re-imagined WordPress might look like. “That’s what makes it fun,” he wrote.

The above sketch for the Moody Ques BBQ team booth building includes the WordPress banner, since it’s a booth sponsored (and heavily attended) by the folks at Audrey Capital. Matt posted a sped-up video of the building’s construction.

I like seeing planning sketches like this, and it’s cool that to see the WordPress banner drawn in. Otto told us all about the BBQ week during WP Late Night and (crazy long) Aftertaste last night.

If you spend any time on the WordPress.org plugin directory (or heard us talking about it on any of WPCandy’s podcasts last week) then you likely noticed a few updates. Matt Mullenweg described the tweaks himself over on the WordPress.org news blog, which is worth reading if you want to know the thinking behind the changes.

Briefly, the updates included:

• Support forum threads are now pulled into their own tab, complete with the plugin’s header graphic at the top (assuming your plugin uses one of these).
• Logged in users can now favorite plugins, which will display on their WordPress.org profile page.
• Plugin authors are back in the right sidebar, and styled a bit nicer than before.
• The plugin sidebar also includes the number of forum threads resolved in the last couple of weeks to help and point out active plugins.

If you’d like to take a look at these updates in action, check out the BuddyPress plugin page for an example, complete with header image.

The WordPress.org team completed the updates last week (along with the latest addition to Audrey Capital) during a BBQ week in Memphis. As Matt said in his post:

This is why WordCamps usually have BBQ – it imparts magical coding powers.

Had you noticed the updates to the plugin directory before seeing the announcement, or this post? Let us know what you think of them in the comments.

If you’ve awaited news on WordCamp Edinburgh UK 2012 and when ticket sales start, then today is your lucky day. You can now get your hands on an early bird ticket for £35, as long as you order it before June 1st when it increases to £45. The ticket price entitles you to two days worth of speakers and a social event on Saturday night. What more could you want?

Sponsorships are also available, ranging from £75 to £1,000 (which covers the official social event on Saturday night).

So are you looking forward to WordCamp Edinburgh UK and your visit to Scotland?

WordPress developer and self-described “prolific plugin developer” Scott Reilly has joined Audrey Capital, Matt Mullenweg’s angel investment and research company. Reilly joins Audrey’s other developers Andrew Nacin and Samuel (Otto) Wood to work on WordPress.org and whatever other special projects come their way.

Reilly has contributed to WordPress since 2004, both by contributing patches to core and by developing and releasing many, many plugins. Odds are you’ve used at least one of his slew of plugins at one point or another — I’ve certainly praised his plugin work time and time again.

Developers at Audrey Capital, put simply, work on whatever projects Mullenweg assigns. Their work often includes work on WordPress.org (the website) and other community initiatives. The work often coincides with the consumption of barbecue, as it did this past week.

WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp Austin are happening this weekend. Actually, they’re happening right now. Since it’s far too late to snag a ticket and run over there (far, far too late), I suggest you attend the events in whatever way you can:

• WordCamp Seattle: #wcsea hashtag on Twitter and the livestream of all three stages
• WordCamp Austin: #wcatx hashtag on Twitter

Just because you can’t be there doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy (part of) the show. And hey, while you’re here in this post, why don’t you share the next WordCamp you plan to attend in the flesh. Visit WordCamp Central to see the events happening all over planet Earth in the near future.

“I’m just a huge supporter of having all these small businesses built around WordPress, whether individuals or small companies,” Pete Davies told me over the phone. “And I know there’s stuff that people struggle with everyday, and stuff you can’t help them with in the WordPress forums.”

Davies is the Premium Services Lead at Automattic, and the lead on the latest Code Poet project. He and his team have expanded CodePoet.com from a directory of high-end WordPress consultants into a resource site for anyone building website — or ”making things” — with WordPress.

The new CodePoet.com, or rather build.CodePoet.com, offers two free ebooks, interviews with WordPress professionals, and a collection of resources the team has curated that they think other Code Poets would find useful. The listings, or Code Poet Directory, can now be found at directory.codepoet.com.

For builders, not just developers

When other members of Automattic looked over the new Code Poet drafts, some said “Okay, but where’s all the code at?” Davies chuckled a bit as he told the story, since Automattic’s work usually includes clever bits of code here or there. The new site is “for builders, not just developers.”

In addition to original interviews (like the ones with business owners Wes Chyrchel and Jonathan Greeley and Ruth Thompson on the site now) Code Poet offers two free ebooks tackling big questions in professional WordPress circles right now: pricing and responsive design.

Above: Getting Pricing Right (left) features Mark Jaquith, Shane Pearlman, and Remkus de Vries walking through their own pricing strategies. WordPress and Responsive Design (right) tackles responsive design with Chris Coyier, Ian Stewart and Sara Cannon.

The new site is “for builders, not just developers.”

One of the more playful parts of the new site is the WordPress IQ Test, powered by Smarterer and featuring questions such as:

• How do you deactivate a plugin?,
• What is the default user role?, and
• How do you delete the Uncategorized category?

Smarterer scores your answers based on their accuracy and the time it takes you to answer correctly. I ended up with a 777, just three points short of the “Master” level.

Clearly the quiz is fundamentally flawed.

Once taken, the Code Poet site will pull in the information from Smarterer and rank Code Poets based on high scores. Eternal bragging rights not necessarily included.

The future of Code Poet

“Normally [for us] there aren’t hard deadlines for much,” Davies said. “We reached out to Seattle and Austin six weeks ago and said we wanted to do this, and having a date fixed, where we had to have everything ready by, has been an interesting experience for Automattic.” Davies and Michael Pick (who also designed the new Code Poet) will be presenting at both camps today. Each will include an announcement of the new Code Poet. The talks are called “Things We Learned the Hard Way” and are partly based on the findings of the WordPress survey taken last year.

WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp Austin will be the first to hear about the new Code Poet, but it won’t be stop there. In the near future CodePoet.com will be replacing Jetpack as the default brand representing Automattic when they sponsor WordCamps.

Aside from the specific offerings with the new Code Poet, it was clear from talking to Davies that he, and it sounded like his whole team, is very excited about the new project. He emphasized that this is just a start, and hopes to find out more about what the community would like to see as Code Poet continues to grow.

“If we get to a point where we bring in people who actually don’t event use WordPress right now, but do some website design and things like that,” Davies said, “and we can introduce them to the concepts to make WordPress work for them, then all the better.”

WP App Store, the project aiming to make plugin and theme purchases easy within the WordPress dashboard — and which we previewed a couple of months ago — quietly launched yesterday (complete with slick intro video). Their plugin is downloadable on their website, which once installed will give you a new top-level menu item for browsing commercial themes and plugins recently added to their system.

Seventeen theme and plugin partners are in place at launch, a few more than announced when the original teaser page went up. Brad Touesnard, the developer behind WP App Store, said that a couple of the vendors that originally showed interest haven’t been responsive, while others just aren’t in the store yet. Developers interested in bringing their own theme or plugin products to WP App Store can request an invite.

Touesnard’s certainly not on his own with this project. In addition to the vendors partnering with WP App Store, his advisors include prominent WordPress business owners Adii Pienaar, Carl Hancock, and Jason Cohen.

Above: The WP App Store plugin, active in the dashboard and displaying newly available themes and plugins.

Right now, as you might expect, the WP App Store lists many more WordPress themes than plugins — sixteen or so pages of the former and only a few pages of the latter. That likely has more to do with the higher ratio of theme businesses to plugin businesses than anything else.

Touesnard said that WordPress.org’s clause restricting storefront plugins will likely keep it from inclusion there, though teased that they “have some pretty clever strategies to distribute the plugin.” We’ll have to wait to hear more about these ideas, but for now you can download their plugin from WPAppStore.com and upload it to your WordPress install.

In answer to a few questions on Hacker News, Touesnard said that the ability to search and review items in the store are high up on the feature list for future versions of the plugin.

What do you think?

Will WP App Store bring a proper theme and plugin shopping experience to the WordPress dashboard? It will be interesting to find out, in time, what kind of penetration WP App Store can achieve. Leave your thoughts in the comments below.