WordPress News Roundup August 2018: WordPress 4.9.8 Brings the “Try Gutenberg” Callout

August 2018 was the month Gutenberg stopped being a plugin that enthusiasts tested and became something every WordPress administrator was asked to look at. WordPress 4.9.8 arrived on August 2 with a dashboard callout inviting users to try the new block editor, and the response, from delighted early adopters to alarmed agency owners, set the tone for the rest of the year.

The month also produced the first serious fork of the Gutenberg era, ClassicPress, a firm commitment that the Classic Editor would be supported for years, and a notable deal in the hosting control panel market. Here is how it all unfolded.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

The biggest transaction touching the WordPress world happened one layer down the stack. On August 21, private equity firm Oakley Capital agreed to acquire cPanel, the control panel software used by a large share of shared hosts to provision WordPress sites. Hosting companies and their customers immediately wondered what new ownership would mean for licence pricing, a question that would come back with force in 2019.

• Growth fund for WordPress businesses: On August 14, Syed Balkhi, the founder behind WPBeginner, OptinMonster and WPForms, launched a growth accelerator fund aimed at investing in WordPress-focused businesses.
• TinyMCE rebrand: Ephox, the company behind the TinyMCE editor that powered WordPress’s classic editing screen, renamed itself Tiny Technologies.

WordPress Core Updates

Core had a single release this month, but it was an unusually consequential maintenance update.

• WordPress 4.9.8 (August 2): The release fixed 46 bugs, enhancements and tasks and updated the Twenty Seventeen theme. Its headline feature was the “Try Gutenberg” callout, shown to administrators on sites without Gutenberg installed and hidden entirely if the Classic Editor plugin was active.
• Privacy tools refined: The same release carried 18 privacy fixes building on the personal data export and erasure tools added in 4.9.6, including clearer confirmation emails and adjustable pagination on the privacy request screens.
• Gutenberg 3.4 to 3.7: The plugin shipped four releases during August. Version 3.4 added a warning in the classic editor when a post contained blocks, 3.6 introduced new icons for every core block, and 3.7 on August 31 debuted a “Spotlight” mode that dims everything except the block being edited, alongside a unified toolbar option.
• Planning for 4.9.9: By the end of the month, contributors were scoping a 4.9.9 release, with the Servehappy effort to warn users on outdated PHP versions among the leading candidates.

Other WordPress News

Beyond core, August was dominated by reactions to the new editor and by the community’s attempts to prepare for it.

• Classic Editor support “for many years”: On August 28, project leadership said the Classic Editor plugin would be supported for many years to come, and argued that the plugin and theme market would ultimately drive Gutenberg adoption. By late August, both the Gutenberg and Classic Editor plugins had passed 200,000 active installations.
• ClassicPress launches: Developer Scott Bowler announced ClassicPress, a fork of WordPress 4.9 without Gutenberg. Core contributor Gary Pendergast responded with a generous public note and an invitation to collaborate.
• Gutenberg in Drupal: A live demo of Gutenberg running inside Drupal 8 showed that the editor’s JavaScript architecture could travel beyond WordPress.
• Yoast SEO 8.0: Released mid-month, it added a Gutenberg sidebar integration and reworked the classic meta box, an early sign that major plugins were committing to the new editor.
• WordPress.com and Pexels: WordPress.com added a free stock photo library from Pexels directly into its media tools.
• Translation Day planning: The Polyglots team began preliminary planning for the fourth Global WordPress Translation Day.
• WordCamp Kochi postponed: Severe flooding in Kerala forced organizers to move WordCamp Kochi to November 3.
• Distributor goes public: 10up made its Distributor content syndication plugin publicly available, complete with Gutenberg support.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

August was relatively calm for mass exploitation, but it delivered one of the more important research results of the year.

• Phar deserialization research: At Black Hat USA, researcher Sam Thomas presented a technique for triggering PHP object injection through the phar:// stream wrapper, using WordPress as a worked example. WordPress hardened against the issue in its December security release, which credited Thomas.
• Ninja Forms security updates: Wordfence flagged security updates to the widely used Ninja Forms plugin on August 28 and urged site owners to update promptly.
• Threat actor investigation: Wordfence published research on August 8 tying a known WordPress attacker to an online pharmacy operation, a reminder that compromised sites are routinely monetised through spam and redirects.

Industry Trends and Insights

• Editor anxiety goes mainstream: The callout exposed Gutenberg to a wave of new testers, and reactions were mixed. Many site owners liked the direction but worried about plugin compatibility, meta boxes and client training.
• Page builders under the spotlight: Agencies relying on page builders started asking how those tools would coexist with blocks, a debate that would shape product roadmaps for years.
• The PHP question: With PHP 5.6 heading for end of life at the close of 2018, the push to get hosts and users onto PHP 7 gathered pace, and WordPress.org refreshed its Update PHP page to make the case more clearly.
• Market position: WordPress had crossed the 30 percent mark of all websites earlier in 2018 according to W3Techs, which made every decision about the editor a decision that affected a large slice of the web.

Theme of the Month: Mythic

Justin Tadlock opened the beta of Mythic, a starter theme built on his Hybrid Core framework, in early August. It brought modern tooling such as Laravel Mix and a cleaner, more modular structure to theme development at exactly the moment developers were rethinking how themes should work alongside blocks.

Plugin of the Month: Gutenberg

There was no other honest choice. With four releases in a month and a callout in WordPress 4.9.8 sending new users its way, the Gutenberg plugin became the most tested piece of software in the ecosystem. Spotlight mode and the unified toolbar in version 3.7 showed the team responding directly to writers’ feedback.

Host of the Month: WP Engine

Fresh from its June acquisition of StudioPress and the Genesis Framework, WP Engine spent the summer integrating its new theme business into its managed hosting platform. That combination of hosting and a widely used framework made it one of the most closely watched companies heading into the Gutenberg transition.

Founder of the Month: Syed Balkhi

Syed Balkhi built WPBeginner into one of the best-known WordPress tutorial sites and grew a portfolio of products including OptinMonster, WPForms and MonsterInsights. In August he turned investor too, launching a growth fund for WordPress businesses, a signal that the commercial ecosystem was maturing and consolidating.

Looking Ahead to September 2018

September should bring further Gutenberg releases and clearer word on whether the next core version will be a 4.9.9 maintenance release or the long-awaited 5.0. Advanced Custom Fields has promised Gutenberg compatibility in its next major version, and plugin and theme authors will be racing to get ready. Watch too for updates on Servehappy and the PHP upgrade push as PHP 5.6’s end of life draws closer.