Over 5 billion spams were caught in the last year with 99.925% accuracy using the WordPress Akismet plugin. This shows that Akismet is staying very high on accuracy. There is a new type of spam that is now getting through due to spammers being very clever. They are starting to copy comments on other posts and change the URL referenced to gain a free link. Spammers are also paying people to go in and leave relevant comments and spam you with their links in them. The most common is spammers leaving kind remarks and compliments and having the webmaster approve the messages due to them feeling flattered by the positive remarks. webmaster freelance
WordPress plans on improving their observance of plugin stats. Mullenweg mentioned there is a plan to watch the bottom 1000 plugins to find the new and upcoming trends. It is easier to see what is gaining fast popularity when monitoring the tail end of the plugins. He also mentioned the use of intelligent tails or the monitoring of the use of plugins and packages in order to gain valuable intelligence from the free market. Currently there are a huge number of features brought in via plugins. He mentions a few examples such as one that does real estate management and another that is an independent record label system.Matt Mullenweg predicted that PHP5 would fail early on due to its lack of major changes. He was wrong and fully admits it. PHP5 is now being used to host WordPress in 79% of WordPress installs. This means that when PHP4 usage falls below 10% or so they will pull the trigger and move ongoing development and support to PHP5 only. This will allow them to speed up and optimize the WP system.
The FutureIncluded during his speech was a live demo of WordPress 2.7. Version 2.7 is expected to be released sometime during November of 2008 and currently has 13,000 blogs testing it.One of the key features of 2.7 will include a dashboard redesign. Mullenweg began by apologizing for a lack of tests regarding usability with a previous dashboard redesign. This time there is much more focus on ensuring that there won’t be issues such as the large number of user complaints which came with the removal of the edit feature in comments.Version 2.7 also introduces a number of major changes with one of the largest being the dashboard navigation being moved to the left hand side. This new navigation has expandable categories that can be viewed in real time when you click them (i.e. no waiting for the page to reload etc.) The right side of the default dashboard setup has a quick blog post and the center features an inbox. The dashboard still has stats and other dashboard features WordPress blog owners will be familiar with. The whole dashboard has been built in ajax which allows changes to be made on the fly. Users will therefore be able to, for example, drag a section in between columns to move stuff over and around as well as the ability to hide or show specific sections.