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If you like ambitious projects, I think this news tidbit will be right up your alley.
In late August, Matt Mullenweg and Automattic announced plans to migrate all of the existing Tumblr websites to WordPress. Given that Tumblr hosts more than half a billion blogs (yes – that’s a “B”), I think this might just be one of the largest migration projects ever undertaken.
This journey started back when Automattic acquired Tumblr in 2019 for a fairly paltry sum of under $20 million (the exact amount wasn’t released). I say fairly paltry because Yahoo had acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion back in 2013 (yes – that’s also a “B”), so there was a pretty hefty drop-off in the valuation.
When Automattic made the acquisition, Matt had already hinted at the end goal of migrating Tumblr to WordPress:
“WordPress is an open source web operating system that can power pretty much anything, including Tumblr.com, but it’s also a large property so will take a bit to figure out and migrate.”
Almost exactly four years later, it seems that the time has finally come to launch the migration.
It’s important to note that, for now at least, the migration is about migrating the backend of Tumblr to WordPress. Active Tumblr users will obviously be wary of the switch, but Automattic said the following about the migration:
“We’re not talking about changing Tumblr. We’re not turning Tumblr into WordPress. That would defeat the purpose. We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction. We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside.”
Automattic reiterated on X/Twitter that “the changes will be exclusively at the backend.”
If you think it would be fun to work on such a large project, Automattic is actively looking for experienced programmers to help with the move, especially those with strong PHP knowledge. You can check out the dedicated application form here to learn more and submit yourself for consideration.
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