Planet WordPress

We committed the beginnings of the Image Uploader, brought to you by Andy.

Yay! Andy did a great job adding stats to the Dashboard! Here’s a screenshot.
This should make blogging at WordPress.com even more attractive as you know other people are going to know about what you’re blogging.
I’m still rather fond of reading the site through an RSS feed but that’s only managable now because there are so few blogs being updated.
When we’re bigger than Blogger.com that won’t be as easy!

Now, this IM client is very cute and I could certainly learn a thing or two from it. The demo works well, you can drag windows around and type messages. Very nice!
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could IM other users of WordPress.com or any WPMU site? (via)

This image editor is rather basic looking but powerful. You can rotate, resize, add text and clipart, colour correct and more. Unfortunately the license isn’t compatible with the GPL so it would be impossible to use in WordPress or other such licened projects.

SmartyPress is another Smarty driven WordPress project.
It looks interesting, and I had the thought that it might be possible to paste an alternative template system into WordPress by piggy-backing on top of the current system.
The home.php, single.php, index.php files of the various themes could be loaders for another more secure templating system rather than PHP. It would certainly make editing templates and securing them against abuse easier, although for WordPress.com we have even fancier ideas to be announced later!

Here’s a brief summary of what’s been happening.