In episode #197 of The Changelog podcast they're joined by Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic) to talk about the future of WordPress and how the newer "Calypso" interface fits in to the overall picture.

This week we’re joined by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress and the CEO of Automattic. We discussed the past, present, and future of WordPress. We talked about the role of JavaScript for WordPress, their new REST API, Calypso, and more.

They talk about WordPress in general, Matt's "State of the Word 2015" presentation, beautiful code, and Steve Krug's Advanced Common Sense website as well. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and get more great shows in the future.

With all of the push to move to PHP5 these days, some people are asking more questions of some of the most common PHP applications as to how they plan to proceed. Nick Halstead asks his question on his blog today - should the community boycott WordPress?

Technology moves forward and PHP will long term lose its dominant position unless it gets everyone to move along with it. [...] Frankly I use WordPress because it has the best plugins but it is no coding wonder and Matt [Mullenweg]'s energies would be better placed helping to move it to PHP 5 only.

The reference there is to a post from Matt (from the WordPress project) going after the community a bit for trying to force a move to PHP5 and that it's "not a big deal" like some are making it out to be. Nick feels that, if it's the case that Matt doesn't even see the move to PHP5 as a big deal, maybe WordPress shouldn't be the one of the blogging tools of choice.

With all of the push to move to PHP5 these days, some people are asking more questions of some of the most common PHP applications as to how they plan to proceed. Nick Halstead asks his question on his blog today - should the community boycott WordPress?

Technology moves forward and PHP will long term lose its dominant position unless it gets everyone to move along with it. [...] Frankly I use WordPress because it has the best plugins but it is no coding wonder and Matt [Mullenweg]'s energies would be better placed helping to move it to PHP 5 only.

The reference there is to a post from Matt (from the WordPress project) going after the community a bit for trying to force a move to PHP5 and that it's "not a big deal" like some are making it out to be. Nick feels that, if it's the case that Matt doesn't even see the move to PHP5 as a big deal, maybe WordPress shouldn't be the one of the blogging tools of choice.

On the heels of a rant posted by Matt Mullenweg (of Wordpress), Ed Finkler has posted some of his own thoughts and rebuttals to the points Matt made.

Among these points are comments about PHP5 features that "could be helping Wordpress users right now" including:

• Parameterized SQL input to eliminate SQL injection attacks
• Filter extension to combat XSS, CSRF, etc. attacks
• Prepared statement/transaction support in PDO and MySQLi
• Improved OOP features and support (code quality, extensibility)

Ed pushes that it's not about the slow adoption of PHP5 in other places. Its about the slow adoption of it in Wordpress so far as it relates to Matt:

The thing is, support of PHP5-only features in WP would give it better speed and security right now. And especially in the case of security, Matt’s reliance on what users say they want is a critical error: users don’t ask about security until well after it becomes a serious issue. Wordpress has one of the worst security records of any PHP application, so I'll go out on a limb and say that it's a problem now. Even if WP users aren't talking about it, WP's core dev team should have addressed this already.

On the heels of a rant posted by Matt Mullenweg (of Wordpress), Ed Finkler has posted some of his own thoughts and rebuttals to the points Matt made.

Among these points are comments about PHP5 features that "could be helping Wordpress users right now" including:

• Parameterized SQL input to eliminate SQL injection attacks
• Filter extension to combat XSS, CSRF, etc. attacks
• Prepared statement/transaction support in PDO and MySQLi
• Improved OOP features and support (code quality, extensibility)

Ed pushes that it's not about the slow adoption of PHP5 in other places. Its about the slow adoption of it in Wordpress so far as it relates to Matt:

The thing is, support of PHP5-only features in WP would give it better speed and security right now. And especially in the case of security, Matt’s reliance on what users say they want is a critical error: users don’t ask about security until well after it becomes a serious issue. Wordpress has one of the worst security records of any PHP application, so I'll go out on a limb and say that it's a problem now. Even if WP users aren't talking about it, WP's core dev team should have addressed this already.