WordPress News Roundup December 2008: WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” Delivers a Redesigned Admin and One-Click Upgrades

December 2008 closed the year with the release that defined WordPress for the next several years. WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” shipped with a redesigned admin, a rearrangeable dashboard, QuickPress, threaded comments and, for the first time, the ability to upgrade WordPress itself with a single click. More than 150 people contributed code, the most for any release up to that point. Before the month was out, the team had already begun prioritising features for 2.8.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in December. The biggest business story was a platform switch: Friendster relaunched its blogs on WordPress MU, moving millions of blogs away from Typepad, as Matt Mullenweg noted on December 20.

WordPress Core Updates

• Release Candidate 1 (December 1): RC1 followed 280 commits since Beta 3, including admin polish, the new menu icons from Project Icon and fixes for known blocker bugs.
• Release Candidate 2 (December 10): A second release candidate arrived as the team closed in on the final build.
• WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” (December 10–11): Released on December 10 and announced on the WordPress blog the next day, 2.7 was named for John Coltrane. Highlights included the new admin interface designed to cut the clicks for common tasks, a drag-and-drop dashboard, Screen Options for hiding columns and modules, a collapsible icon menu, QuickPress, threaded and paged comments, replying to comments from the dashboard, one-click plugin installation from WordPress.org, sticky posts and automatic core upgrades.
• Version numbering: The 2.7 announcement said the release after 2.9 would be 3.0, avoiding version number inflation.
• Planning 2.8 (December 24): The team began prioritising features for 2.8, starting with dozens of ideas postponed during the 2.7 cycle.

Other WordPress News

• WordCamp San Francisco 2009: Mullenweg announced that the next WordCamp San Francisco would take place on May 30, 2009.
• Five years of the interface: Mullenweg pointed to a retrospective tracing WordPress’s admin design over five years, timely given the scale of the 2.7 changes.
• Art Direction: A new plugin for adding custom styling to individual posts without editing theme files drew attention from designers.
• Meetups: Mullenweg planned to meet WordPress users at the December Refresh Houston meetup while home for the holidays, and announced the first WordPress meetup in Dubai for New Year’s Day.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No security releases shipped in December, but 2.7’s automatic core upgrades were arguably the most important security feature WordPress had added. Until now, applying a security fix meant downloading files and copying them over by hand, which is why so many hacked sites ran old versions. With one-click upgrades, the gap between a fix being released and a site being patched could shrink dramatically.

Industry Trends and Insights

WordPress ended 2008 with a polished admin, a theme directory, an iPhone app and a company that had made three acquisitions in a little over a year. Friendster’s move from Typepad to WordPress MU underlined the platform’s momentum against hosted rivals. The roadmap in the 2.7 post pointed to the next frontiers: better media handling, tools for plugin and theme developers, theme updates and closer ties with BuddyPress and bbPress.

Plugin of the Month: Art Direction

Art Direction let writers give individual posts their own styling without touching the theme, so a single article could carry a magazine-style design. Mullenweg highlighted it on December 20 as an example of how flexible WordPress presentation could be.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

Mullenweg capped 2008 by shipping 2.7, setting the date for WordCamp San Francisco 2009 and laying out the plan for 2.8. A year that began with a Series B ended with WordPress arguably in its strongest position yet.

Looking Ahead to January 2009

January was expected to bring the first maintenance release for 2.7 as bug reports came in from the many sites upgrading, along with continued discussion of the 2.8 feature list.