WordPress News Roundup December 2009: WordPress 2.9 “Carmen” Ships and a New Default Theme Is Promised

December 2009 closed the year with a major release. WordPress 2.9, named “Carmen” after jazz vocalist Carmen McRae, was released on December 18 with a global trash and undo, a built-in image editor, batch plugin updates and oEmbed support that turned a pasted video URL into an embedded player. More than 140 contributors had worked on over 500 tickets.

Just as significant were the conversations that happened before the release. Core committers met in person around WordCamp Orlando, and out of that summit came the news that WordPress would get a brand-new default theme in 2010 to replace Kubrick, along with a clearer plan for the merger-driven 3.0 cycle.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No major WordPress company deals were announced. In a small change of hands within the community media scene, Joost de Valk took over The WordPress Podcast from Charles Stricklin, with plans to merge it into his Press This show.

WordPress Core Updates

• 2.9 Beta 2: Released on December 2, available for download or through the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.
• Release Candidate 1: On December 16 the team declared 2.9 feature-complete and asked experienced users to upgrade and test.
• WordPress 2.9 “Carmen”: Released on December 18, 2.9 added the trash, image cropping, rotating, flipping and scaling, batch plugin updates and oEmbed video embeds. Under the hood it brought rel=canonical support, post thumbnails for themes, a comment meta table, better custom post type support and optional automatic database repair and optimisation. Plugin compatibility data from WordPress.org now indicated whether plugins were likely to work with the new version. The release required MySQL 4.1.2 or later.
• WordPress 2.9.1 Beta 1: On December 23 the team released a first maintenance beta after a bug in certain PHP cURL versions stopped scheduled posts and pingbacks from processing correctly on some hosts.
• 2.9.1 Release Candidate 1: Followed on December 29, bringing the number of fixed tickets to 23.
• Setting scope: A Christmas Day post discussed scope creep and proposed pausing to plan carefully before starting on 3.0.

Other WordPress News

• Core team in Orlando: In early December Matt Mullenweg, Ryan Boren, Andrew Ozz, Peter Westwood and Mark Jaquith met in Orlando around WordCamp Orlando for extra discussions about the project’s vision, and commits slowed briefly while they were away. A short video from the meetup featured them alongside Jane Wells.
• A new default theme: The first summary of the meetup, “2010: A Theme Odyssey,” reported Matt Mullenweg’s announcement that WordPress would ship a new default theme in 2010, retiring Kubrick.
• Canonical plugins: A December 8 post explained the idea of “canonical plugins,” officially endorsed plugins maintained by community teams, which Matt had been discussing at WordCamps through the year.
• WP.me shortlinks: WordPress.com introduced wp.me short URLs for its users alongside the 2.9 release.
• Ajax Edit Comments goes commercial: The popular comment-editing plugin switched to a paid model on December 24.
• WordCamp Boston ahead: Community members were making travel plans for WordCamp Boston on January 23.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

December had no core security release. The problems that surfaced after 2.9, such as the cURL-related failure of scheduled posts, were reliability bugs rather than vulnerabilities, and they were handled through the 2.9.1 testing cycle that ran into the new year.

Industry Trends and Insights

WordPress 2.9 reflected how much the web had changed since Kubrick became the default in 2005. Video embedding from services like YouTube was now an everyday task, image editing was expected inside the publishing tool, and site owners ran enough plugins that one-by-one updates had become a chore.

• Canonical URLs for SEO: Built-in rel=canonical support followed the search engines’ adoption of the canonical link element earlier in 2009.
• Toward a CMS: Improved custom post type support in 2.9 laid groundwork for 3.0, where custom content types would get a full admin interface.
• Official plugins: The canonical plugins concept hinted at a middle path between bloating core and leaving essential features to unmaintained third-party code.

Theme of the Month: Kubrick

Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick had been WordPress’s default theme since version 1.5, and its blue header was one of the most recognisable designs on the web. December’s announcement that a new default theme would arrive in 2010 marked the beginning of its farewell.

Plugin of the Month: WordPress Beta Tester

The WordPress Beta Tester plugin let site owners switch an install onto beta builds and update them from the dashboard. Recommended in the December 2 beta announcement, it made testing 2.9 as simple as an ordinary upgrade and helped widen the pool of people trying pre-release code.

Host of the Month: WordPress.com

Automattic’s hosted service picked up 2.9’s new features and added wp.me shortlinks for its users in December. For bloggers who did not want to manage upgrades at all, WordPress.com remained the easiest way to stay on the latest version.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

WordPress’s co-founder used the Orlando summit to set the next year’s direction, from a new default theme to canonical plugins and a more careful approach to the scope of 3.0. The decisions made that month shaped the release that would merge WordPress MU into core.

Looking Ahead to January 2010

January was expected to bring the final WordPress 2.9.1 release and the publication of a scope and schedule for WordPress 3.0. WordCamp Boston on January 23 was the first major event of the new year.