Over the last year, blogging platform WordPress has nearly doubled in size growing from 10.5 million blogs last March to 18 million today. With more than 10% of the Web powered by WordPress – according to founding developer Matt Mullenweg – it has become increasingly important for the company to support more interfaces and today it has done just that with iPad-optimized themes.
The company announced today that an iPad-optimized view would be immediately available, bringing “swiping, rotation, and many other features of the iPad” to all 18 million blogs on WordPress.com.
When Mullenweg spoke at this year’s SXSW, he described WordPress as increasingly becoming a platform. Not only is WordPress used as a blogging platform, but as a content management system. WordPress.com and WordPress.org handle more than 520 million unique visitors per month, said Mullenweg. Now, many of those blogs will be more accessible to iPad users.
According to the announcement, the iPad version of WordPress.com blogs will be powered by HTML5 and OnSwipe, bringing an “app-like” functionality to iPad users. Already, about 750,000 daily pageviews come from iPad users and the company says that “with the launch of Apple’s iPad we have seen the future of computing and it is touch.”
The addition of an iPad-optimized view will allow blog owners to customize background images, logos, fonts and skins for iPad visitors, as well as disable or enable the iPad view entirely. For those who run WordPress on their own server, the iPad view is available as a separate plug-in.
Watch the video below for a bit more on where Mullenweg sees the future of WordPress.
