WordPress News Roundup August 2016: WordPress 4.6 “Pepper” Ships With Shiny Updates as Helen Hou-Sandí Takes On 4.7

August 2016 delivered WordPress 4.6 “Pepper,” a release built around making the admin feel faster and more familiar. Plugin and theme updates finally happened in place without page reloads, the admin switched to native system fonts, and the editor gained an inline broken-link checker and better content recovery.

A week later, development of the year’s final release began under Helen Hou-Sandí, with a new default theme and the long-delayed REST API content endpoints both possible. The month also saw the .blog domain open to trademark holders and Envato celebrate a decade in business.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No significant acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in August, but several businesses changed course. The Layers theme framework ended its exclusive arrangement with Envato and launched its own marketplace, WP Job Manager was forked to create a generic listings plugin, and Headway Themes’ future looked uncertain amid reports of financial trouble. VersionPress, now open source, said it would offer optional paid services to fund development.

WordPress Core Updates

• Release candidate 2: Published on August 11 with more than 30 changes since the first RC.
• WordPress 4.6 “Pepper”: Released on August 16 and named after baritone saxophonist Park Frederick “Pepper” Adams III. It brought streamlined updates, native fonts in the admin, an inline link checker that flags broken URLs as you type, and content recovery that restores unsaved posts after a crash or lost connection.
• Under the hood: 4.6 added resource hints, moved the HTTP API onto the Requests library, introduced WP_Term_Query and WP_Post_Type, overhauled meta registration, loaded translations on demand, added Customizer APIs for setting validation and notifications, and made multisite faster.
• The team: Dominik Schilling led the release, with Garth Mortensen as release deputy and 272 contributors with props.
• WordPress 4.7 kicks off: Development began in the week of August 24, led by Helen Hou-Sandí with Aaron Jorbin and Jeff Paul as deputies. The target date was December 6, with focuses including better media organisation, Customizer usability, a smoother theme setup experience and possibly the REST API content endpoints. A new default theme was under consideration.
• Editor layout ideas: Contributors explored rearranging the post editor to improve the writing experience, as two distinct approaches to easier site customisation were debated.

Other WordPress News

• .blog sunrise: On August 18, registration of .blog domains opened to trademark owners, the first phase of Automattic’s rollout of the extension.
• Envato at 10: Envato, home of ThemeForest and CodeCanyon, celebrated ten years in business on August 22.
• Plugin guidelines: The Plugin Review Team revamped its guidelines and invited feedback on GitHub.
• Translations grow: The Polyglots team reported record annual growth in contributors and translations.
• WordCamp US: Organisers called for volunteers and estimated 3,000 attendees for December in Philadelphia.
• Jetpack: Jetpack 4.2 shipped performance and security updates on August 17, and the Jetpack 4.3 beta rebuilt the admin interface in React.
• Milestones: Contact Form 7 passed 40 million downloads, WordSesh 4 ran for 24 hours on August 20, and Bucharest announced a WordCamp for October 8 and 9.
• Abandoned infrastructure: Users of the Posts 2 Posts plugin began looking for alternatives as development wound down.
• Publishing apps: Ulysses 2.6 added publishing to WordPress, and WordPress.com launched browser notifications.
• A blog returns: Writer Dennis Cooper, whose 14-year-old blog had been removed from Blogger, relaunched on WordPress.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

August was relatively quiet for security. There was no core security release during the month, and the main fixes came through routine plugin updates such as Jetpack 4.2. The 4.6 release itself improved resilience indirectly: in-place updates made it quicker for administrators to apply patches, and moving the HTTP API to the Requests library modernised how WordPress made outbound connections.

Industry Trends and Insights

Google set new rules for mobile publishers on August 23, announcing that from January 2017 pages with intrusive interstitials and pop-ups could rank lower on mobile. For the many WordPress sites using pop-up opt-in plugins, it was a signal to rethink their tactics.

The web’s infrastructure was modernising quickly. Let’s Encrypt passed five million active certificates, and figures showed PHP 7 had overtaken PHP 4 in usage, a small but symbolic milestone for a platform still supporting very old PHP versions. In the United States, the White House published a federal source code policy and launched Code.gov, part of a wider government embrace of open source.

Theme of the Month: Baton

Baton, a free business theme released at the end of August, included a homepage layout builder inside the Customizer. It was a good example of the debate the core team was having about site customisation: how to give users flexible layouts without bolting a full page builder onto every theme.

Plugin of the Month: Contact Form 7

Takayuki Miyoshi’s Contact Form 7 passed 40 million downloads in August. Free, simple and maintained for years by one developer, it remained one of the most installed plugins on WordPress.org and a quiet pillar of the ecosystem.

Host of the Month: Pantheon

Pantheon, the website operations platform that served both Drupal and WordPress, continued to court larger WordPress teams in 2016, including publishing a community resource on scaling WordPress earlier in the year. Its developer workflow of separate development, test and live environments appealed to agencies working on complex sites.

Founder of the Month: Collis Ta’eed

Collis Ta’eed, co-founder of Envato, marked the company’s tenth anniversary in August. ThemeForest had become the largest marketplace for WordPress themes, making Envato one of the most influential commercial forces in the ecosystem, even as authors such as Layers explored selling elsewhere.

Looking Ahead to September 2016

September was expected to bring the first 4.6 maintenance release and early decisions for 4.7, including whether to ship a new default theme. Jetpack 4.3’s React-powered admin was due out of beta, and Ninja Forms was preparing its long-awaited 3.0 release.