WordPress News Roundup January 2011: WordPress 3.1 Release Candidates and WordCamp San Francisco Dates

January 2011 was a month of final testing. WordPress 3.1 spent the whole month in the release candidate stage, and the core team took the unusual step of rethinking parts of the release late in the cycle rather than shipping something it was not happy with. The finished version would not arrive until late February.

Away from the code, the project set out its ambitions for the year. Matt Mullenweg used his annual birthday post to look back on 2010 and to name his goal for 2011: three major WordPress releases, after a year in which only one, WordPress 3.0, had shipped. The annual WordCamp San Francisco also got its dates, giving the community its first fixed point on the summer calendar.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No notable acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in the WordPress ecosystem in January 2011. The business news of the month came instead from Automattic’s look back at a busy 2010, covered below.

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress 3.1 was the focus all month. It was set to be a release aimed at people using WordPress as a content management system, with better tools for custom content and a new way to move around the dashboard.

• Release Candidate 2 (January 1): The year opened with WordPress 3.1 RC2, which the team described as close to final, with only a handful of known bugs left.
• Release Candidate 3 (January 22): After reviewing the features in RC2, the developers decided some needed reworking. RC3 differed enough from earlier builds that plugin and theme developers who had tested a beta or RC were asked to test again.
• What 3.1 was bringing: The release in testing included the new admin bar, a faster way to link to existing posts and pages, Post Formats for themes, a separate Network Admin for multisite, and advanced queries that combine taxonomies and custom fields.

Other WordPress News

• WordCamp San Francisco 2011 announced: On January 24 the project announced that the official annual WordPress conference would run August 12–14, 2011, marking the event’s fifth anniversary. As usual, it would include Mullenweg’s State of the Word address.
• A look back at 2010: In his January 11 post, Mullenweg listed the launch of VaultPress, a new version of Akismet, new mobile apps and the creation of the WordPress Foundation among 2010’s milestones. He also reported 28 new hires at Automattic, 7.2 million blogs added to WordPress.com, and 38 million downloads of WordPress from WordPress.org.
• Three releases in 2011: The same post set the goal of three major core releases in 2011. As it turned out, the project hit that target, shipping 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 before the year was out.
• Best blogging platform: Responding to a Fast Company piece that asked which blogging platform was best, Mullenweg said the answer was easy, and that he hoped the “best CMS” question would one day be just as easy to answer.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

January itself brought no new core security release, but many site owners spent the first days of the month applying the one that landed just before New Year.

• WordPress 3.0.4 follow-up: WordPress 3.0.4, released on December 29, 2010, was labelled a critical update. It fixed cross-site scripting flaws in KSES, the library WordPress uses to filter HTML, and site owners were urged to update right away.

Industry Trends and Insights

The wider open source CMS market was busy in January. Drupal 7 was released on January 5 after a long development cycle, and Joomla 1.6 followed on January 10. Both were major rewrites aimed at the same organisations that were starting to look at WordPress as a full CMS.

• WordPress as a CMS: With custom post types and taxonomies arriving in 3.0 and archive pages and advanced queries coming in 3.1, WordPress was competing directly with traditional CMS platforms rather than only with blogging services.
• PHP 4 on the way out: WordPress had already said the previous summer that it would drop PHP 4 and require PHP 5.2. That change was planned for WordPress 3.2, and hosts still running old PHP versions were running out of time.

Theme of the Month: Twenty Ten

Twenty Ten, the default theme introduced with WordPress 3.0 in June 2010, was still the starting point for most new WordPress sites in January 2011. It showed off custom menus, custom headers and backgrounds, and it was a popular base for child themes, which suited the growing number of people using WordPress to build sites rather than just blogs.

Plugin of the Month: WordPress SEO

Joost de Valk’s WordPress SEO plugin, introduced in 2010, was quickly becoming the go-to choice for site owners who wanted control over titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps and canonical URLs in one place. As more businesses moved to WordPress in early 2011, search tools like this became a standard part of every new install.

Host of the Month: Bluehost

Bluehost was a long-time fixture of the hosting recommendations on WordPress.org and one of the most common places for first-time users to set up a self-hosted site. With one-click installs and low entry prices, it remained a default choice for beginners at the start of 2011.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic, turned 27 on January 11 and used the occasion to set the year’s agenda. His call for three major releases in 2011 shaped the pace of core development for the next twelve months, and his plans for WordCamp San Francisco put the summer’s biggest event on the map.

Looking Ahead to February 2011

All eyes were on the final release of WordPress 3.1, which the team expected once the reworked release candidate had been tested. Site owners on the 3.0 branch could also expect continued maintenance while the switch to 3.1 got under way, and plans for the South by Southwest festival in March were beginning to take shape.