DrupalPress, Matt vs Dries
24 Apr 2008On my left side: Matt Mullenweg:
- Matt was born in 1984 in Houston, Texas.
- Amongst other things (see below) Matt is a passionate photographer.
- In Jan 2003, unhappy with the capabilities of B2/Cafelog, he starts with the development of what will grow to be the hottest blog platform software around: WordPress.
- In October 2004 he moves from Houston to San Francisco to work for CNET on, amongst other things, WordPress.
- In October 2005, he leaves CNET too concentrate on WordPress and also launches Akismet, a (comment/trackback) spam detection platform (with plugins for e.g. WordPress).
- In November 2005 Matt launches WordPress.com, the (free) hosted WordPress provider.
- In Dec 2005 Matt annouces the creation of AutoMattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet.
- Matt is cited as #16 on PCWorld’s list of “50 Most Important People on the Web”
At my right hand: Dries Buytaert:
- Dries is born in 1978, in Belgium.
- Amongst other things (see below), Dries is a passionate photographer.
- Grown out of a small-scale bulletin board experiment, Drupal is released as open-source CMS in Jan 2001. Dries is and will remain lead developer and ultimate-veto-editor-in-chief.
- In Nov 2007 Dries starts Acquia, “a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux“
- Dries becomes Dr. Buytaert in Jan 2008
- Acquia launches its Mollom service, a spam detection platform (with plugins for e.g. Drupal)
- In April 2008 Dries is cited as one of BusinessWeek’s Young Entrepreneurs of Tech
I especially like the ‘spam detection’ detail. If this is the main concern of two of the leading CMS platforms, you can imagine spam is a real problem.
If we extrapolate on the previous similarities, we could expect:
- something like Drupal.com – a freemium hosted Drupal provider. The free version gives you an instant xyz.drupal.com site with some standard themes (layouts) and plugins. If you want your own domain, or a custom layout, you will have to pay.
- a Mollom plugin for WordPress – because there is already an Akismet plugin for Drupal
- WordPress starts releasing ‘distributions’: a special version for e.g. NGO’s, for schools, for music groups. This distribution will contain the latest core of WordPress with some plugins, themes, widgets, pages … pre-installed.
In any case, I admire both guys and hope they continue to successfully lead some of the most promising web software platforms around.
