He talks with enthusiasm about the next stage of WordPress – “Facebook in a box”.  WordPress will bundle its multi-blog platform (WordPress MU) into WordPress, and with that comes  the potential to  plug-in BuddyPress and transform a WordPress installation into a social media site. His aim is to “connect all the WordPresses together” via this ecosystem.   Anyone who contributes to WordPress – say a plugin – can be ranked by their peers.

Although he uses social networks like Facebook he says:

“I think it’s important that for anything that’s a big part of our lives, there’s also an open source alternative.”

There’s a potential problem with the current social networks:

“You don’t own the fruits of your labour into the service, their interests are not always aligned with yours, and even the ones that have been good in the past, are not necessary going to be as good in the future..”

He mentions communities using BuddyPress including boy scouts, churches, and down syndrome families. They might not necessarily want to be part of a bigger community like Facebook.  He adds that  you might also want to keep your social networks separate:

“Things you do in the bedroom, and things you do in public, and those might be two social networks that you don’t want to connect.”

He talks a little about the history of WordPress.  How in the past, if you wanted to change the title of your site, you had to hack the code. If you wanted to extend it, you had to copy and paste your plugin into a hacks file.

“I feel really old when I talk about this stuff”.

Making WordPress open to plugins has created a huge community of developers with 5000 plugins and 5000 themes. As a result we configure our own set-ups.

“We all have our own personal WordPress. None of us are using the same software… kind of cool, but also a big challenge.”

He wants to make sure that any upgraded plugin warns you if it’s going to break the system.  And now themes include more functionality they will have to be managed too.  But the trouble is this kind of automation is hard to implement.

“We had been talking about automatic upgrade for five years.  We needed someone who didn’t know how hard it would be to come in and do it. That’s the story of  WordPress. I didn’t know enough to know what was hard to do.”

The young founder – born in 1984 – has an eye on the future. He believes that its open source license is a “bill of rights” that helps to guarantee its future.  Even if Automattic – the developer of WordPress – goes bust, WordPress will continue to have a life of its own.

He feels more comfortable now than ever before that “WordPress will be around for a very long time, even after my involvement, even possibly my own mortality.”

(Sorry, correction, it was built by New Media Maze with input from Puffbox)

Some great sound-bites on slipping WordPress into big organisations that are suspicious of anything free and prefer to spend hundreds of thousands on a CMS.

“When dealing with big company, set a precedent quickly, find somebody who has respect of others and hammer the Hell out of them until the take it up.”

“This is a product that is better than the most expensive ones out there.”

“Do you mention word blog? it’s a big issues for companies.”

“I don’t think blog is as dirty a word as it was a few years ago.”

And on the ease of use

“They can treat it as Microsoft Word”.