PHP::Impact recently named sixteen PHP open source applications that have “changed the world” including two of my all-time favorite, much loved, and long used web phenomenons, WordPress and Gallery. Ten years running is a long time for the popular, pragmatic, database-wielding phpMyAdmin to have been in high demand—I had no idea phpMyAdmin had been around that long. I am also very impressed to see Magento eCommerce on the list since it just came out of beta this March. So far, Magento is getting rave reviews and a few complaints. It will be interesting to see how these projects continue to evolve and change take over the world.

It was extraordinarily cool to meet WordPress creator and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg at a Utah WordPress Meetup on Saturday, February 2, 2008. Matt is an all around nice guy who is unassuming and very laid back. Despite his reserved nature, I think he has a million ideas in his head at any given moment. His ability to really listen to and get to know people was evident as he mentioned about a thousand past conversations he’d had with many people I know of (and many I didn’t). At 24 years old, he’s only created one of the most-loved blogging platforms ever (WordPress), built one of the coolest companies on the planet (Automattic), raised millions in venture capital, and managed to put together a phenomenal team dedicated (pure and simple) to developing free and open source web software for all.

A media darling with serious geek appeal, Automattic quite expectedly makes my list of most-favorite-companies-in-the-world because they manage to combine extraordinary developer talent with a business model built around open source all the while maintaining blog, anti-spam, identity, wikis, forum software, and more via a world-wide spread of developer locations from Australia to Bulgaria. Talk about breaking the barriers of a normally prohibitive job market demographic… don’t let geography get in the way of hiring the most talented developers! I would love to hear more about Matt’s thoughts on his process for hiring such an amazing team. The Automattic outfit completely fascinates me.

Special thanks to Joseph Scott, Automattic’s brilliant “Bug Exorcist,” for organizing the lunch.

Ever wonder how to SEOify your Wordpress install? Here’s the code I used in my Wordpress theme to use custom fields for description and keywords meta tags. The down side to using this method is that you have to modify it for any new customized meta tags you want to use. I really only wanted to customize the description and keywords meta tags, so this worked out great for me. (more…)