[wp-hackers] Which version runs on Wordpress.com?

[Andrew Nacin]

On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Rafael Ehlers <rafaehlers at gmail.com> wrote:

> Several is you been generous, I think more to thousands... what about that
> new admin?!?!


This answer is coming from someone who has zero access to and almost no
knowledge of the WP.com codebase (I don't work for Automattic), but
learning how companies use (and abuse) core is very important to my job, so
I ask lots of questions:

Let's face it, MU on the whole was just one giant nasty core hack. After
3.0 when MU was merged in, the number of hacks they had dropped
precipitously. They also used customized (read: hacked-to-hell) super admin
panels until core did a network admin in 3.1. Hacks for things like adding
hooks, fixing bugs, etc., do happen, but at the end of the day they
typically get submitted back to core and processed like any other bug
report or enhancement request. (When you host tens of millions of sites on
thousands of servers and you have to submit code back to core the same way
everyone else does, a hack here and there is just gonna happen, even though
kittens everywhere run.[1])

As Beau said, pretty much everything is just plugins, including the new
front-end dashboard.

[1] http://codex.wordpress.org/images/b/b3/donthack.jpg