WordPress News Roundup February 2009: WordPress 2.7.1 Ships and Plugin Search Gets a Rebuild

February 2009 gave WordPress users the first polish release for 2.7 and a much better way to find plugins. WordPress 2.7.1 arrived on February 10 with 68 tickets closed, and nine days later WordPress.org swapped out its unloved plugin search for a proper full-text engine. Both changes were small on paper but touched almost every site.

It was also a month for looking ahead. Matt Mullenweg’s keynote at WordCamp Germany and a podcast preview of 2.8 gave the community its first sense of where the next major release was heading, while WordCamp Denver closed the month with a live stream for people who could not attend.

WordPress Core Updates

The core team shipped one release and began shaping the next major version.

• WordPress 2.7.1: Released on February 10, the first maintenance release of the 2.7 branch fixed 68 tickets. Because 2.7 had introduced in-dashboard upgrades, many users installed it straight from the Tools → Upgrade screen, which made it an early real-world test of the new updater. The announcement acknowledged that this .1 release had taken longer than usual.
• Plugin directory search rebuilt: On February 19 WordPress.org replaced its plugin search with Sphinx, an open source full-text search engine, after frequent complaints about poor results. The improvement applied both on the website and inside the dashboard’s Plugins → Add New screen.
• 2.8 takes shape: Talks at WordCamp Germany and coverage on WordPress Weekly offered a first look at features planned for 2.8, which would eventually focus on widgets, themes and speed.

Other WordPress News

Events, books and a developer contest filled out the month.

• WordCamp Germany: Matt Mullenweg’s keynote walked through WordPress history and previewed 2.8 features, and summaries circulated widely in the English-speaking community afterwards.
• WordCamp Denver: The February 28 event offered live video and audio for remote viewers, an approach that was becoming standard for larger WordCamps.
• Change the Web Challenge: On February 26 WordPress.org announced its participation in a contest to build plugins, widgets and mashups that help people find ways to take action, with the best WordPress plugin to be featured.
• WordPress For Dummies, second edition: Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s updated guide reached bookstore shelves, reflecting the changes introduced in 2.7.
• Community lists and tutorials: Ryan Imel published a list of 50 WordPress people to follow, NetTuts compiled around fifty tutorials, and Brad Williams highlighted ten lesser-known plugins.
• A plugin looks for a new home: The developer of WP Ajax Edit Comments announced he was stepping back and sought someone to take the plugin over, an early example of the maintenance problem facing popular free plugins.
• Ideas forum critique: WP Tavern argued that the WordPress Ideas site needed a reset because its top-voted suggestions were more than two years old.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

February was quiet on the security front. WordPress 2.7.1 was presented as a maintenance release rather than a security update, and no major core advisories were issued. The month’s main lesson was practical: the new one-click upgrader only helped if hosts allowed WordPress to write its own files, and many users were still upgrading manually over FTP.

Industry Trends and Insights

WordPress’s growth was increasingly visible in the wider publishing world. Mainstream how-to books were being revised for each major release, design blogs were running WordPress tutorial round-ups, and a commercial theme scene was taking shape around membership clubs and premium frameworks.

• Theme clubs under scrutiny: Readers of the WPDesigner theme club reported unexpected payment notices, part of a broader conversation about how trustworthy the young premium theme market really was.
• Video tutorials compete: A new site, SeeHowTwo, launched WordPress video tutorials shortly after WordPress.tv, showing demand for visual learning.
• Search matters: Rebuilding plugin search acknowledged that, with thousands of plugins, discovery had become one of WordPress’s biggest usability problems.

Theme of the Month: Mimbo

Darren Hoyt’s free Mimbo theme was one of the best-known “magazine” layouts of the period, showing that WordPress could front a news-style homepage rather than a simple reverse-chronological blog. As more publishers looked at WordPress as a lightweight CMS in early 2009, themes like Mimbo were the proof of concept.

Plugin of the Month: IntenseDebate

Automattic had acquired the IntenseDebate commenting system in 2008, and its WordPress plugin gave site owners threaded replies, comment voting and reputation features without abandoning their existing comment data. With WordPress 2.7 having just added native threaded comments, the plugin was a useful comparison point for what richer discussion tools could look like.

Host of the Month: DreamHost

Los Angeles-based DreamHost was a long-standing WordPress.org recommended host with one-click installs and generous shared plans. For bloggers trying 2.7’s automatic upgrader for the first time, it was one of the environments where the feature generally worked without fiddling with permissions.

Founder of the Month: Brad Williams

Brad Williams, co-founder of the WordPress agency WebDevStudios, was one of the most visible community voices of early 2009, writing guest posts, building plugins and sharing recommendations such as his February list of overlooked plugins. WebDevStudios was an early example of a business built entirely around WordPress client work.

Looking Ahead to March 2009

March was expected to bring more detail on WordPress 2.8 and on the project’s plans for Google Summer of Code 2009. The core team was also preparing a series of posts on how non-developers could contribute, following the success of the 2.7 icon design contest.