WordPress News Roundup August 2012: State of the Word Puts WordPress on 16.7% of Top Sites as BuddyPress 1.6 Ships

August 2012 was WordCamp San Francisco month. On Saturday, August 4, Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word at the Mission Bay Conference Center, reporting that WordPress now ran 16.7% of the top million websites and sharing results from a user survey with 27,000 responses from 158 countries. He was also frank about where WordPress was falling short, singling out media handling as an area that needed to become a first-class feature.

Two days later, BuddyPress 1.6 “Lucali” shipped with the WordPress toolbar, new activity management tools and Akismet spam protection for activity streams. The official WordPress news blog, meanwhile, published nothing all month, with attention focused on the conference and on planning for WordPress 3.5.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in August 2012.

WordPress Core Updates

There was no core release in August, but the State of the Word set the direction for the rest of the year.

• A preview of 3.5: Mullenweg previewed WordPress 3.5, due in December, with the Twenty Twelve theme, full retina support, a new welcome screen and new media uploaders.
• Release pace: He acknowledged that WordPress had been averaging about two major releases a year, short of the three he wanted.
• Testing: He also called for more user interface testing, and noted that unit tests had been added to help developers test their code.

Other WordPress News

• State of the Word (August 4): In his annual address, Mullenweg said WordPress was nine years old, that WordCamps had grown from one in 2006 to 52 in 2011, and that 2012 was on track for about 75. About a third of all WordPress downloads had happened in the past year.
• The survey: Two thirds of the 27,000 responses came from outside the US, and 66% of respondents said they used WordPress as a CMS rather than as a blog. The survey also suggested that many more people were earning a large part of their living from WordPress than a year earlier.
• Jetpack and mobile: Jetpack had reached one million downloads in 13 months and two million four months later, the mobile apps had passed five million downloads, and Mullenweg previewed a redesigned iOS app.
• WordPress.org improvements: He highlighted the plugin directory changes from May, noting that more forum threads had been resolved in the three months since than in all of 2011, and outlined plans for better reviews and ratings.
• Developer hack day (August 5): WordCamp San Francisco ended with a developer hack day at True Ventures, where contributors from around the world worked on WordPress together.
• BuddyPress 1.6 “Lucali” (August 6): The release replaced the old BuddyBar with the WordPress toolbar, added activity management panels in the dashboard and integrated Akismet with the activity stream. BuddyPress 1.6.1 followed on August 13.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

August brought no core security release or major plugin vulnerability. Mullenweg shared an article on the growing power of password cracking, noting that two-factor authentication would become more important in the years ahead, advice that applied to every WordPress administrator.

Industry Trends and Insights

The State of the Word captured a project in transition. WordPress had started as a blogging tool and was now mostly used as a CMS, and Mullenweg suggested it might one day become an application framework. Most of its growth was coming from outside the US, and the project planned to engage its international community more closely.

• Growth at the top: 16.7% of the top million sites, up from 14.7% a year earlier, showed WordPress continuing to win larger sites.
• Automatic updates: Mullenweg noted that larger web hosts were moving towards updating WordPress automatically unless users opted out, an idea that would later come to core.
• Real-time collaboration: He also floated the idea of Google Docs-style collaborative editing in WordPress, without saying how it might be built.
• New competition: The same month, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams unveiled Medium, a new publishing platform focused on writing, adding to the field of simple alternatives to WordPress.

Theme of the Month: Weaver

Weaver, a free theme by Bruce Wampler, gave users a large number of options for colours, layouts and fonts. With two thirds of survey respondents using WordPress as a CMS, highly configurable free themes like Weaver were helping non-developers build full websites.

Plugin of the Month: BuddyPress

BuddyPress 1.6 “Lucali” was the month’s most important plugin release. Adopting the WordPress toolbar made BuddyPress sites feel more like the rest of WordPress, and the new activity management and Akismet integration tackled spam, one of the biggest problems for community sites.

Host of the Month: WP Engine

WP Engine was growing quickly nine months after its Series A, adding customers among businesses that relied on WordPress. As more businesses used WordPress as a CMS, as the survey showed, demand for managed WordPress hosting kept rising.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg returns as Founder of the Month for a State of the Word that was both celebratory and self-critical. By naming media, release pace and usability testing as weak spots, he set clear goals for WordPress 3.5 and beyond.

Looking Ahead to September 2012

September was expected to bring the first beta of WordPress 3.5, with its new media tools, and possibly a maintenance release for 3.4. Planning for the Community Summit on Tybee Island in late October was also in full swing.