Couple of days ago, Matt Mullenweg, the creator and founder of open source content management system – WordPress had announced that he will be taking over the development and future of 2 popular WordPress News sites Weblogs Tools Collection and WPTavern
Matt had taking the initiative to take over WPTavern when Jeff, the WPTavern creator wanted to step out of WordPress world. Matt wanted Jeff to go out of it with the best deal possible for all the hard work he done over the years in WPTavern and WordPress Community. The deal were conduct silently and secretly but were openly announced couple of days ago at WPTavern. So now one of the popular WordPress News site are now owned by Matt Mullenweg and Automattic.
Weblogs Tools Collection had been one of the leading source for WordPress News, Themes and Plugins release from the beginning of WordPress growth. Two months ago on March, Mark Ghosh, the creator of WLTC announced that he will be leaving the WLTC and transfer the site over to a more willing and presently capable hands. We did assumed that it will be one of the staff or author of the site but turns out Matt reached out to Mark Ghosh and planning to take over one of the popular WordPress News site also which he did.
According to Matt, Mark didn’t talked to any other buyers because his priority was having it in good hands – someone who would keep it around and continue the development of WordPress News Sources. It is a great effort by Mark so WLTC will not disappeared from WordPress World. Both take over procedure were done by third party, Audrey which now temporarily put both site on hibernation and archived mode.
What’s the future hold for WLTC and WPTavern?
There’s no initial planning for both site according to Matt, but the buyout takeover are not intended to profit and make money from both site traffic and advertisement revenue.
“Neither was done to be a business or make any money and there are no plans for ads or sponsors on either site.” – quote from Matt.
Matt did mention ‘maybe’ they will reboot the WPTavern and use BBPress as the the posting core and using the full advantage of the new WordPress 3.6 post formats. Either way all development planning are still on early stage and Matt haven’t decided anything officially yet.
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So what do you guys think on ‘How both site should develop in future’? Head over to WPTavern and give some ideas and your thought on this matters. Pretty sure Matt love to hear what the WordPress community would like to see for both WordPress News site in future.