Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of the popular open-source blogging tool WordPress and writes a popular blog Photo Matt. After quitting his job at CNET, he has devoted the majority of his time to developing a number of open source projects and is a frequent speaker at conferences. In late 2005, he founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com and Akismet.. Chanh Ong who has taken his interview is an admin volunteer at opensourceCMS site

First of let me tell you the History of this blogging genius -

In March 2003 he co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik. GMPG wrote the first of the Microformats.

In April 2004 with fellow WordPress developer Dougal Campbell, they launched Ping-O-Matic which is a hub for notifying blog search engines such as Technorati of blog updates. Ping-O-Matic currently handles over 1 million pings a day.

In May 2004 chief WordPress competitor Movable Type announced a radical price change which drove thousands of users to seek alternate solutions. This is widely regarded as the tipping point for WordPress.

In October 2004, he was recruited by CNET to work on WordPress for them and help them with blogs and new media offerings. He moved to San Francisco from Houston, TX the following month.

In December 2004, Mullenweg announced bbPress which he wrote from scratch in a few days over the holidays.

Mullenweg and the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn” in February 2005, which had over 900,000 downloads. The release introduced their theme system, moderation features, and a new front end and back end redesign.

During late March and early April 2005, Andrew Baio found at least 168,000 hidden articles on the WordPress.org website that were using a technique known as cloaking. Mullenweg admitted it and removed all hidden articles.

After a somewhat quiet year, in October 2005 he announced he was leaving CNET to focus on WordPress and related activities full time.

Several days later, on October 25, Akismet was made public to the world. Akismet is a distributed effort to stop comment and trackback spam by using the collective input of everyone using the service.

In November 2005 Mullenweg’s project WordPress.com stopped being invite-only and opened up to the world.

In December 2005 he announced Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet. Automattic employed people who had contributed to the WordPress project, including lead developer Ryan Boren and WordPress MU creator Donncha O Caoimh. An Akismet licensing deal and WordPress bundling was announced with Yahoo! Small Business web hosting about the same time.

In January 2006 Mullenweg recruited former Oddpost CEO and Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider to join Automattic as CEO, bringing the size of the company to 5.

Interview

Chanh: Who are you and tell us a little about yourself(s)?

Matt:
I grew up in Houston, Texas where I mostly focused on music, specifically jazz saxophone. I moved to San Francisco a few years ago to work on Wordpress at CNET, and then a year after that I left to found http://automattic.com and focus on Wordpress and other Free Software projects full-time.

Chanh: Why did you want to create Wordpress in the first place?

Matt:
I was running my own blog at photomatt.net and I found the experience of many of the tools available very frustrating and overly complicated. I felt there could be something better, and in the tradition of open source development I started hacking on it and evangalising the philosophy.

Chanh: What do you consider are some of the strongest features of Wordpress?

Matt:
Out of the box Wordpress will do everything you expect in modern blog software, and hopefully get out of your way and let you focus on what’s really important — writing. What draws a lot of people to the platform, however, is the huge add-ons community that has produced thousands of themes and plugins for the platform.

Themes can change the entire look and structure of your blog with a single click and plugins can extend the functionality of Wordpress to do almost anything you can imagine.

Finally we have some “light” content management features, for example you can create hierarchal static pages with clean URLs like /about/my-cat/. This is one of the more exciting sides of Wordpress right now, with everyone from Ford to 71miles doing really
interesting things with it.

Chanh: What are some of the features you want to incorporate into future Wordpress releases?

Matt:
It’s hard to say, it really depends on where the community leads us. We’re lucky to have a very diverse userbase that is on the bleeding-edge of where blogging is going, and the community pushes the product forward.

Chanh: What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of creating an open source CMS?

Matt:
Writing a CMS is pretty easy, but there are a thousand details that separate the weekend experiments from the mature projects, and I think that’s the hardest thing to recreate. I think it takes 10 years to make
truly great software. (We’re only 4 years into it.)

Chanh: There is a plethora of open source CMS’s available out “there” for people to choose. Why should people consider Wordpress?

Matt:
Probably because someone they respect or admire is using Wordpress, many of the shining lights of the blogosphere are on Wordpress. It’s also pretty easy to get started, it’s not too complicated to understand any parts of the system, and most web hosts bundle some sort of one-click Wordpress installer. We focus more on the end-user experience than anything else.

Chanh: Anything else that you want to share with opensourceCMS community?

Matt:
No, except to thank the site admins for providing such a great service. I use it myself regularly to check out other systems and see if they’ve done anything interesting in their latest releases. I think it’s done a lot for the CMS community to decrease the friction of good ideas.

References :: wikipedia.org and myopensourcecms.com