WordPress News Roundup April 2017: WordPress 4.7.4 Release, WooCommerce 3.0 Ships and WordPress 4.8 Drops Old Internet Explorer

April 2017 was a month of big releases outside core and steady preparation inside it. WooCommerce 3.0 arrived on April 4 with the largest set of changes in the plugin’s history, while WordPress 4.7.4 shipped 47 fixes and the scope of WordPress 4.8 came into focus, including the end of support for Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10.

It was also a month that said a lot about how the WordPress business world was changing. Automattic announced it would close its San Francisco office because so few employees used it, Shopify walked away from its official WordPress plugin, and Headway Themes showed the risks of a commercial product losing momentum.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No major WordPress acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in April. The month’s corporate news was about strategy rather than deals: Automattic’s office closure and Shopify’s exit from the WordPress plugin market.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 4.7.4: Released April 20 as a maintenance release with 47 bug fixes and enhancements. The main fixes resolved a conflict between an upcoming version of Chrome and the visual editor and smoothed out inconsistencies in media handling, with more REST API improvements alongside. WordPress 4.7 had been downloaded close to 60 million times.
• Goodbye, old IE: Core contributors confirmed that WordPress 4.8 would end support for Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10, freeing developers from years of workarounds.
• Image widget for 4.8: The Customizer team formally proposed an Image widget for 4.8, part of a wider set of media widgets meant to make sidebars easier to manage without code.
• Editor research: Results from the editor experience survey showed that 75% of respondents did not use distraction-free writing mode, the kind of data the Gutenberg team was gathering as it planned the new editor.
• WP-CLI: Alain Schlesser was named a co-maintainer of WP-CLI alongside Daniel Bachhuber.

Other WordPress News

• WooCommerce 3.0: Released April 4, it brought a new product gallery with zoom and lightbox, CRUD classes that abstracted how product and order data is stored, and a new command-line interface. Its new version number signaled how far it went beyond a routine update.
• Automattic closes San Francisco office: Automattic said it would close its office in San Francisco because very few people used it, a striking statement from one of the best-known distributed companies in tech.
• Plugin Directory fixes: After March’s criticism, WordPress.org restored plugin stats, links to older versions and the tabbed interface on plugin pages.
• Shopify exits: Shopify discontinued its official WordPress plugin, leaving WooCommerce with even less competition inside WordPress.
• Headway Themes: The Headway theme framework appeared to be dying a slow death, with customers reporting stalled development and slow support.
• Jetpack 4.8: The plugin introduced a redesigned settings screen and a global WordPress.com toolbar.
• Events: WordCamp Europe announced its speakers and opened Contributor Day registration, then introduced small business sponsorships. WordCamp US organizers said they were planning for 2,500 attendees, and WordCamp for Publishers was set for August 17–19 in Denver.
• Community funding: The San Francisco WordPress Meetup began using Open Collective to fund its activities in the open.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• Router-powered brute force: Wordfence reported that compromised home routers were being used to launch brute-force login attacks against WordPress sites. The finding made IP-based blocking harder, since attacks came from ordinary residential connections.
• Licensing risk: The 2017 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis report found widespread GPL license conflicts in commercial codebases, a reminder that compliance problems can be as costly as security bugs.
• A quiet core month: WordPress 4.7.4 was a maintenance release rather than a security release, and no major core vulnerabilities were disclosed during April.

Industry Trends and Insights

• PHP 7 adoption: Yoast reported that its PHP upgrade notice was producing a significant increase in sites moving to PHP 7, and BuddyPress survey results showed 54% of respondents on PHP 7.0 or later.
• Remote work goes mainstream: Automattic’s office closure became a widely cited example of a company built around remote work, and the company hosted a free online conference on design and exclusion on April 21.
• Funding open source: Open Collective emerged as a transparent way for open source projects and meetups to raise and spend money.
• New platforms: Interest in the federated Mastodon network spread to WordPress, with a plugin for embedding Mastodon posts.

Theme of the Month: Checathlon

Checathlon, a free business theme that drew attention this month, stood out for its built-in support for Easy Digital Downloads. For people selling software, e-books or other digital goods, it offered a clean storefront without the cost of a premium theme.

Plugin of the Month: WooCommerce

WooCommerce 3.0 was April’s biggest release in the WordPress world. Its new CRUD layer laid the groundwork for custom data storage and better performance, and the new gallery and CLI improved life for store owners and developers. It required some extension updates, but it set the direction for WooCommerce for years.

Host of the Month: DreamHost

DreamHost, one of the hosts recommended on WordPress.org, had spent the year supporting the independent web, including backing the Micro.blog Kickstarter in January. Its managed DreamPress plans and long involvement in open source made it a natural fit for WordPress users who cared about owning their content.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg was both WordPress’s product lead for 2017 and the CEO behind Automattic’s decision to close its San Francisco office. The move reinforced his long-held view that distributed teams could build world-class software, at the same time as he was steering core toward the new editor.

Looking Ahead to May 2017

May was set to bring the first beta of WordPress 4.8, with media widgets, a rich Text widget and a new events dashboard widget in the works. A debate over which JavaScript framework core should adopt was also starting to build.

WordCamp Europe ticket sales were moving quickly ahead of June in Paris, and WooCommerce was expected to ship follow-up releases as stores and extensions adjusted to 3.0.