WordPress News Roundup August 2007: WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 Arrives as Turkey Blocks WordPress.com

August 2007 was busy on two fronts. In core, security releases for both maintained branches arrived early in the month, and the first beta of WordPress 2.3 landed at the end of it, previewing native tags and update notifications. At WordPress.com, a court order in Turkey blocked the entire service, a free-speech fight that came just as the hosted platform celebrated its second birthday.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress acquisitions or investments were announced in August.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 2.2.2 and 2.0.11 (August 5): Two releases for the 2.2 branch and the legacy 2.0 branch, containing only security and minor bug fixes so that plugins and themes would not be affected.
• WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 (August 28): After three months of development, the first 2.3 beta invited testers to try built-in tag support, notifications for core and plugin updates, and faster JavaScript.

Other WordPress News

• WordPress.com turns two: Matt Mullenweg marked the service’s second birthday with a post on WordPress.com’s traffic growth. He later shared a browser breakdown drawn from 115 million WordPress.com visits.
• Plugin competition winners: The Weblog Tools Collection plugin competition, promoted on the WordPress blog in June, announced its winners on August 27.
• WordCamp Beijing: Plans emerged for a WordCamp in Beijing, one of the first signs of WordCamps spreading internationally.
• Community logos: WordPress users in Malaysia created special logos for the country’s 50th anniversary of independence.
• Celebrity sites: Prince’s 3121.com was running on WordPress, one of the more unexpected adopters of the summer.
• Handling traffic spikes: Mullenweg linked to a breakdown of how a WordPress site coped with a front-page Digg surge, a recurring worry for bloggers at the time.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

The August 5 releases were the month’s only core security fixes. The team kept them narrow, with no feature changes, so administrators on either branch could upgrade without worrying about compatibility. Users of the 2.0 line, which the project had promised to support until 2010, received 2.0.11 at the same time.

Industry Trends and Insights

On August 17, a Turkish court blocked access to all of WordPress.com after lawyers for Adnan Oktar complained about blogs that used his name. In a post on August 25, Mullenweg said the demands went far beyond removing a few blogs: the lawyers wanted names blocked from domains and tags across the service. He called the block disproportionate and compared the request to censorship in China.

The case showed that a single large hosted platform could become a target for country-wide blocking, a risk that would recur for WordPress.com and other services in later years.

Plugin of the Month: Contact Form 7

Takayuki Miyoshi’s Contact Form 7 first appeared in the plugin directory in the summer of 2007. It offered flexible forms built from simple tags and would go on to become one of the most installed WordPress plugins ever.

Host of the Month: WordPress.com

Two years after launch, WordPress.com was serving traffic on a scale that let Automattic publish browser statistics from 115 million visits. The Turkish block was a setback, but it also showed how central the service had become.

Founder of the Month: Takayuki Miyoshi

The Japanese developer behind Contact Form 7 built it after using earlier contact form plugins and learning from their code. His decision to keep it free and focused made it a staple of business sites for years.

Looking Ahead to September 2007

September was set to be one of the biggest months of the year. The 2.3 team planned weekly betas every Monday, a release candidate and a final release on September 24, bringing tags and update notifications to every self-hosted WordPress site.