WordPress News Roundup February 2013: Twenty Thirteen Debuts and the MP6 Admin Redesign Appears

February 2013 was a building month. There were no WordPress releases and no posts on the official news blog, but the development blogs were busy: the first draft of the Twenty Thirteen default theme appeared, one of the 3.6 feature teams was cut, and a quietly published plugin called MP6 hinted at a complete visual overhaul of the WordPress dashboard.

Around the ecosystem, Automattic released a new icon font and new Jetpack features, Envato began measuring its authors’ appetite for full GPL licensing, and a Yahoo policy change gave Matt Mullenweg an opening to make the case for distributed work.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No significant acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in the WordPress ecosystem in February.

WordPress Core Updates

• Twenty Thirteen first draft: On February 18 the core team shared a first draft of Twenty Thirteen, the default theme planned for 3.6. Bold colour blocks, a single-column blog layout and full support for every post format made it a deliberate break from the restrained Twenty Twelve, and weekly project updates followed.
• Editorial Flow dropped: A day later, the team announced it was dropping the Editorial Flow project from 3.6. Trimming scope early would become a recurring theme of the release.
• Feature teams press on: Revisions, autosave and post locking, menus and the Post Formats UI all continued with regular updates. Bug scrubs were also scheduled weekly to keep the ticket count under control.
• MP6 surfaces: Late in the month, an experimental plugin called MP6 appeared in the plugin directory. It flattened the admin icons and restyled the dashboard, and its stated purpose was to let designers iterate on wp-admin quickly outside trunk. Few expected it at the time, but MP6 would become the WordPress 3.8 admin design by the end of the year.

Other WordPress News

• Jetpack 2.2: Jetpack 2.2 brought WordPress.com-style Likes to self-hosted sites, letting readers react to a post without commenting. It was a small feature with a big implication: Jetpack was becoming the channel through which WordPress.com features reached the wider WordPress world.
• Genericons: Automattic released Genericons, a GPL icon font built for blogs and used in the upcoming Twenty Thirteen. Theme developers quickly picked it up for their own projects.
• Envato surveys its authors on the GPL: After January’s WordCamp dispute, Envato published partial results from a survey asking ThemeForest and CodeCanyon authors whether they wanted a fully GPL licensing option. The results were a clear signal that change was coming.
• Creative Market goes GPL: Creative Market announced that WordPress themes sold on its marketplace would be 100% GPL, and WordPress.com responded by offering one of its premium themes there for self-hosted sites, a first for Automattic’s theme team.
• Automattic and remote work: When Yahoo moved to end working from home, Matt Mullenweg pointed out that Automattic was fully distributed, with about 130 of its roughly 150 people based outside San Francisco, and invited anyone interested to apply.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

February was quiet on the security front, with no core security release and no widely exploited plugin flaw. Sites that had not yet applied January’s 3.5.1 security update remained the main concern.

Industry Trends and Insights

• Marketplaces bend toward the GPL: Creative Market’s move and Envato’s survey showed that community norms around licensing could shift commercial marketplaces, not just the other way round.
• Design debt in wp-admin: MP6 was an admission that the dashboard looked dated next to newer publishing tools, and that fixing it would require a faster, plugin-based way of iterating.
• Distributed teams as an advantage: The Yahoo debate put a spotlight on a working model that much of the WordPress economy already took for granted.

Theme of the Month: Twenty Thirteen

Even as a first draft, Twenty Thirteen was the theme everyone was talking about. Its saturated colours and post-format-centric design were divisive, but it was the clearest statement yet of where core wanted blogging themes to go, and it gave developers something concrete to test the new formats against.

Plugin of the Month: MP6

MP6 was barely more than a restyled menu when it appeared, but it was the seed of WordPress’s biggest visual change in years. Running the redesign as a plugin let anyone install it, give feedback and watch it evolve, a model that would reshape how core features were built.

Host of the Month: WordPress.com

WordPress.com earned the spot this month for stepping outside its own walls, selling a premium theme on a GPL marketplace for self-hosted users and pushing Likes to Jetpack sites. Both moves blurred the line between Automattic’s hosted service and the wider WordPress community.

Founder of the Month: Collis Ta’eed

As co-founder and CEO of Envato, Collis Ta’eed was at the centre of the licensing debate. Surveying authors rather than dismissing the WordCamp controversy was the first step toward the fully GPL option ThemeForest would introduce weeks later.

Looking Ahead to March 2013

WooCommerce 2.0 is due in early March after its release candidate phase. The 3.6 team is working toward its first beta, and Twenty Thirteen updates will continue weekly. Envato is expected to announce what it will do with its GPL survey results.