WordPress News Roundup August 2010: WordPress 3.1 Planning Begins and Peter Westwood Joins Automattic

August 2010 was a quieter month after the rush of 3.0. There was no new WordPress release, and the WordPress.org news blog was silent as the team turned its attention to improving the project’s own infrastructure. Behind the scenes, though, the next cycle was taking shape, and by the end of the month developers were collecting feature ideas for WordPress 3.1.

The community stayed busy. Core committer Peter Westwood joined Automattic, WPCandy found a new owner, BuddyPress and bbPress went their separate ways, and WordCamps took place in Houston and Montreal.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• WPCandy changes hands: Ryan Imel became the new owner of WPCandy, a WordPress news and resources site that had gone quiet, and announced it was back in business in mid-August. No financial details were shared.

No larger acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in the WordPress space during the month.

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress 3.0.1 remained the current release throughout August.

• 3.1 scope discussion opens: On August 30 the core team announced on its development blog that the week’s developer chat would begin discussing the scope of 3.1, and invited feature suggestions in the comments.
• Early 3.1 developer notes: Ryan Boren warned that calling conditional query tags such as is_page() too early would cause fatal errors in 3.1 rather than failing silently, and that the WP_USE_MULTIPLE_DB constant would no longer be supported, with HyperDB recommended instead.
• Code of conduct proposal: On August 31 a proposal was posted to adopt a contributor code of conduct, inspired by Drupal’s recent adoption of the Ubuntu code of conduct.
• WordPress.org improvements: The plugin directory was upgraded to run on newer bbPress code, “broken” plugin reports now led users to a support form, support topics gained email subscriptions, and WordPress.org began publishing version statistics for WordPress, PHP and MySQL through api.wordpress.org.
• Contributor handbook: Andrew Nacin asked what new core contributors needed to know, as the first step toward a handbook.

Other WordPress News

• Peter Westwood joins Automattic: The WordPress.org core committer joined Automattic as a “Happiness Gardener” on August 25.
• BuddyPress and bbPress split: BuddyPress developer John James Jacoby discussed decoupling the two projects as bbPress was reworked into a WordPress plugin.
• WordCamp Houston: Houston hosted its first WordCamp early in the month, and Matt Mullenweg shared photos from the event.
• WordCamp Montreal: A two-day WordCamp took place in Montreal on August 28–29, drawing more than 300 attendees.
• OpenCamp Dallas: The successor to WordCamp Dallas opened its doors to Drupal and Joomla as well, running August 27–29 in Addison, Texas, with a full WordPress track.
• Cutline retired on WordPress.com: WordPress.com replaced the Cutline theme, originally created by Chris Pearson, with Coraline. Matt Mullenweg noted users moving from Thesis to GPL frameworks such as Genesis.
• New themes from Matt: Mullenweg released two of his older designs, Matala and Mazeld, as free themes.
• Mobile testing: The WordPress for iOS team began forming a beta testing group.
• Function count: Ozh’s analysis of 54 releases found WordPress had grown to 3,240 functions by version 3.0.1.

Industry Trends and Insights

Publishing anonymous usage statistics through the WordPress.org API gave the community an official, machine-readable view of which PHP and MySQL versions sites were running, data that would inform decisions like July’s plan to drop PHP 4. It also reflected a project increasingly making choices based on measurements rather than guesswork.

• Hosts streamline installs: HostGator launched QuickInstall, its own script for installing WordPress and other applications, as hosts competed to make WordPress setup effortless.
• Visual builders: Reviews of Headway described it as a WordPress theme framework with Squarespace-style visual editing, a sign of growing demand for drag-and-drop design.
• Open source awards: Nominations opened for the 2010 Packt Open Source Awards, where WordPress would again compete with Drupal and Joomla.

Theme of the Month: Headway

Headway, a premium framework launched in 2009 by Clay Griffiths, let users design layouts with a visual editor rather than code. WP Tavern’s August review compared it to Squarespace, capturing why it appealed to site owners who wanted design control without touching templates.

Plugin of the Month: BackupBuddy

iThemes’ BackupBuddy, sold through its PluginBuddy brand, backed up an entire WordPress site and could restore or migrate it to a new server. With VaultPress still invite-only, it was the most common commercial choice for full-site backups in mid-2010.

Host of the Month: HostGator

HostGator launched QuickInstall in August, a custom installer similar to Fantastico that put WordPress a click away for its large base of shared hosting customers. It was a small change with a big reach, given how many new WordPress sites started on budget hosts.

Founder of the Month: Ryan Imel

Ryan Imel took over WPCandy in August and relaunched it as an independent WordPress news site. Under his ownership it became a fixture of community news in the early 2010s, alongside WP Tavern and Weblog Tools Collection.

Looking Ahead to September 2010

September was expected to bring a decision on the scope and schedule of WordPress 3.1, based on the feature suggestions gathered at the end of August. Recordings of WordPress sessions from OpenCamp were also due to be published.