WordPress News Roundup April 2016: WordPress 4.5 “Coleman” Ships and WordPress.com Goes HTTPS Everywhere

April 2016 brought WordPress 4.5 “Coleman,” a release focused on smoothing everyday work: inline link editing, more formatting shortcuts, live responsive previews in the Customizer and native custom logos. A maintenance release followed two weeks later as 4.5 passed six million downloads.

It was also a landmark month for HTTPS. Automattic used Let’s Encrypt to switch on encryption for every WordPress.com site, including custom domains, and Let’s Encrypt itself left beta. Meanwhile the Panama Papers leak drew attention to what can happen when a law firm’s WordPress site is left years out of date.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• Syed Balkhi acquires Google Analytics by Yoast: On April 14, Syed Balkhi announced he had acquired Yoast’s Google Analytics plugin for an undisclosed amount and renamed it MonsterInsights. He responded quickly to early user criticism of the transition with immediate changes.
• VersionPress goes open source: Months after its seed round, VersionPress transitioned into a free, open-source project.

WordPress Core Updates

• Release candidate 2: Published on April 10 with 91 changes since the first RC.
• WordPress 4.5 “Coleman”: Released on April 12 and named after saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. It added inline linking, new formatting shortcuts, live responsive previews and custom logo support, while under the hood smart image resizing made generated images load up to 50% faster with no noticeable quality loss. Selective refresh, script loader improvements, better embed templates and JavaScript library updates rounded out the release.
• The team: Mike Schroder led 4.5 with Adam Silverstein as release deputy and Mel Choyce as release design lead. There were 298 contributors with props, and 4.5 shipped fully translated into 44 languages.
• WordPress 4.5.1: Released on April 26, it fixed 12 bugs, including a class issue that broke sites using Twenty Eleven and an incompatibility between some versions of Chrome and the visual editor.
• WordPress 4.6 begins: Development of 4.6 kicked off the week of April 18 with Dominik Schilling as release lead.
• REST API sets its sights on 4.7: The REST API team said it would aim to propose merging the content endpoints in WordPress 4.7.
• Features as projects: The “features as plugins first” model evolved into “features as projects,” allowing work to be developed in different ways before merging.

Other WordPress News

• HTTPS for WordPress.com: On April 8, Automattic announced it was partnering with Let’s Encrypt to enable HTTPS on all WordPress.com sites, including those on custom domains. Let’s Encrypt left beta on April 12, and Sucuri later partnered with it to offer free certificates to customers.
• Global WordPress Translation Day: The Polyglots team’s first Global WordPress Translation Day on April 24 drew 448 participants from 105 countries, and WordPress was announced as 100% translated into Marathi at the end of the month.
• WordCamp London: WordCamp London 2016 took place in early April, complete with a giant Wapuu and a limited-edition R2-Wapuu.
• WordCamp growth: Figures released in April showed Europe led WordCamp growth in 2015 with a 70% increase in events.
• Jetpack 4.0: Released on April 21 with UI improvements and a new editor view for VideoPress.
• Business milestones: Beaver Builder passed $1 million in revenue after two years, and AffiliateWP passed $30,000 in monthly revenue.
• REST API in the wild: The Guggenheim museum relaunched guggenheim.org on WordPress using the REST API.
• Data transparency: WP Tavern explained what WordPress.org does with the data it collects from sites during update checks.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• Panama Papers: After the leak from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, analysis suggested its main website ran WordPress 4.1, released in December 2014, and its client portal an outdated Drupal 7 release. Investigators had not confirmed whether those weaknesses were used in the breach, but the story became a widely cited warning about unpatched CMS installs.
• User Role Editor 4.25: Patched a critical vulnerability on April 4.
• Jetpack 3.9.6: Fixed a bug that could insert random Vimeo videos into comments.

Industry Trends and Insights

April showed how quickly free HTTPS was changing the web. With Let’s Encrypt out of beta and WordPress.com encrypting millions of sites at once, the argument that SSL was too expensive or complicated for small sites was disappearing. It set the stage for WordPress to push the wider hosting industry towards HTTPS by default before the end of the year.

The business side of WordPress also kept maturing. Public revenue milestones from Beaver Builder and AffiliateWP, and Syed Balkhi’s purchase of a plugin with a large existing user base, showed that WordPress products were becoming valuable, tradeable assets.

Theme of the Month: Twenty Sixteen

With 4.5 introducing native custom logo support, Twenty Sixteen was among the default themes updated to use it. Four months after its debut, it was the theme most new WordPress sites started with, and a showcase for the Customizer improvements that defined 4.5.

Plugin of the Month: MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights was born in April from Yoast’s Google Analytics plugin. Under Syed Balkhi it was rebranded and set on a new course, and it went on to become one of the most widely used analytics plugins for WordPress.

Host of the Month: WordPress.com

WordPress.com turned on HTTPS for every site it hosted in April, including custom domains, using Let’s Encrypt. It was one of the largest single HTTPS rollouts on the web and a practical demonstration that encryption could be free and automatic for ordinary site owners.

Founder of the Month: Syed Balkhi

Syed Balkhi, founder of WPBeginner and co-founder of OptinMonster, added MonsterInsights to his portfolio in April, weeks after the launch of WPForms. Buying an established plugin and rebuilding it around a premium product was a strategy he would repeat many times as his company grew.

Looking Ahead to May 2016

May was expected to bring early WordPress 4.6 development under Dominik Schilling, including work on Shiny Updates, and WordPress’ 13th birthday on May 27. WordCamp Europe in Vienna was approaching in June, and the redesigned Plugin Directory was moving towards public prototypes.