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Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on the blog and yes, it’s rather ironic a company surrounded with blogs doesn’t have a Blogging Community…but I digress…

I was reading my feeds yesterday and I came across the Matt’s entry about WordPress security. There was a security issue, they patched it but that did not stop people from criticizing. One of the beautiful features of the internet is freedom of speech. Wincent wasn’t disrespectful or condescending…he stated what he felt were the “facts” and expressed his opinion. In truth, I’m glad Wincent Colaiuta wrote his article because it caused me to think.

All of our 9rules membership areas are built from the core functions of WordPress. All the areas of my.9rules are build from the core functions of bbpress. With the launch of Ali2 we will be expanding with more features based on those two products. You know what? Scrivs, Mike and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Security issues come up. As much as the WordPress team tries to prevent these things from happening, they do happen. They respond quickly and responsibly to these issues. When I say quickly, I do not mean they rush to get a patch out. To me, they are taking the time to address the issue the best way possible along with perhaps addressing other issues in the process. The key: by being open source there are people looking at the code and finding these things – which does not normally happen with commercial products.

Matt does bring up a good point:

Making notification better and upgrading more painless for people not lucky enough to be on a host like that are problems with some very clever minds on them, and I’m confident that we’ll have good progress toward each in the next major release of WP.

From the hosting side even if there is a one-click upgrade process, getting people to upgrade is challenging. Then I thought about all the members who are using WordPress, our my9rules users using WordPress, and how we could help give back to the community. I changed my personal blog to WordPress. My thinking is if I believe in WordPress as much as I do, why aren’t I using it? Now I am. When it’s time to upgrade, I’ll be doing it right along with everyone else. This will also aid me in troubling issues members and users have from time to time.

As mentioned, I interact with my WordPress users on a daily basis. Ironically, as I write this someone noticed I implemented tags on my blog and asked me how to do it. With the launch of Ali2, we will be starting a community specifically for blogging. This is long overdue because we receive a fair amount of questions about blogging, the vast majority of them WordPress related. 9rules will help educate our users about WordPress, the importance of updating and all the things that encompass blogging such as design, writing, etc. This makes sense because we have a good amount of members in our design and programming communities that release themes for WordPress.

Finally, 9rules will have a community dedicated to blogging.

Thank you Matt – if it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be where we are today.