WordPress News Roundup February 2011: WordPress 3.1 “Reinhardt” Ships

February 2011 delivered the first major WordPress release of the year. WordPress 3.1, codenamed “Reinhardt” after the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, arrived on February 23 with the admin bar, Post Formats and a set of tools that pushed WordPress further into CMS territory. Two weeks earlier, WordPress 3.0.5 had shipped as a security hardening release for everyone still on the 3.0 branch.

On the hosted side, WordPress.com opened up a new business model. For the first time, users of the free blogging service could buy premium themes from outside designers, a move that brought commercial theme shops such as WooThemes and The Theme Foundry directly onto Automattic’s platform.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in the WordPress space in February 2011. The most significant commercial change of the month was the premium theme marketplace on WordPress.com, which gave theme businesses a new revenue channel.

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress 3.0.5 and 3.1 RC4 (February 7): WordPress 3.0.5 was a security hardening release recommended for all users and required for sites with untrusted user accounts. The same day brought 3.1 Release Candidate 4, which included the 3.0.5 fixes and about two dozen other bug fixes.
WordPress 3.1 “Reinhardt” (February 23): The fourteenth major release introduced a redesigned linking tool for connecting to existing content, the admin bar, a cleaner writing screen that hid rarely used panels by default, and a refreshed blue admin colour scheme.
CMS features: 3.1 added Post Formats so themes could style asides, galleries, quotes and other post types differently, archive pages for custom post types, a dedicated Network Admin for multisite, an overhauled import and export system, and advanced queries that combine taxonomies and custom fields.
By the numbers: The release announcement counted more than 2,000 commits, more than 820 closed Trac tickets and more than 180 contributors in the 3.1 cycle.

Other WordPress News

Premium themes on WordPress.com: On February 3, Automattic began selling premium themes to WordPress.com users. The first two were Headlines from WooThemes and Shelf from The Theme Foundry, sold as one-time purchases. Mullenweg explained the thinking behind the launch in a post on ThemeShaper.
Is blogging in decline? When a New York Times article suggested blogs were losing ground to social networks, Mullenweg pushed back on February 21, noting that the article’s own figures showed Blogger’s global unique visitors up 9% to 323 million, while WordPress.com added around 80 million uniques over the same period according to Quantcast.
How WordPress.com is made: Author Scott Berkun, then working at Automattic, published an essay on how the WordPress.com team builds and ships its software. His time at the company later became the book The Year Without Pants.
A WordPress board game: WordCamp Indonesia showed off what was billed as the first WordPress board game, a small sign of how far the community had spread.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

WordPress 3.0.5 was the month’s security story. It fixed two moderate issues that could let Contributor- or Author-level users gain further access to a site, and one information disclosure flaw that could let Author-level users see drafts or private posts they should not see.

Extra hardening: The release also added protection for plugins that did not use the WordPress security API correctly, plus defence in depth against a flaw fixed in an earlier version.
Credits: Two of the issues were reported privately by Nils Juenemann and Saddy. The WordPress security team found or fixed the rest.

Industry Trends and Insights

The arrival of premium themes on WordPress.com showed how the commercial theme market was maturing. Businesses that had built their customer base selling GPL themes for self-hosted sites now had access to millions of hosted blogs, and Automattic had a new way to earn revenue beyond upgrades and VIP hosting.

From blog to CMS: Post Formats and custom post type archives in 3.1 made it easier to build magazine sites, portfolios and business sites without heavy custom code.
The social media debate: The argument over whether Facebook and Twitter were replacing blogs would recur for years. WordPress’s growing traffic numbers suggested blogs were changing shape rather than disappearing.

Theme of the Month: Headlines

Headlines from WooThemes was one of the two themes that launched premium themes on WordPress.com. A magazine-style design with a featured post slideshow, multiple menus and 15 colour schemes, it sold for a one-time $45 in what Automattic described as an experiment.

Plugin of the Month: Akismet

Akismet, Automattic’s comment spam filter, had received a new version in 2010 and was still bundled with every WordPress download. As blogs and comment volumes kept growing, it remained the first plugin most site owners activated after installing WordPress.

Host of the Month: WordPress.com

WordPress.com earned the pick this month for opening its doors to outside theme designers. The premium theme launch made the hosted service more attractive to users who wanted a professional look without managing their own server.

Founder of the Month: Adii Pienaar

Adii Pienaar, co-founder of WooThemes, saw his company become one of the first commercial theme shops on WordPress.com. Under his leadership WooThemes had grown into one of the best-known premium theme businesses, and the WordPress.com partnership put its work in front of a much larger audience.

Looking Ahead to March 2011

March would bring the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, where Mullenweg was scheduled to talk about the future of WordPress with John Battelle. With 3.1 out, the core team was also expected to begin work on WordPress 3.2, along with maintenance releases for any issues found in 3.1.