WordPress News Roundup January 2012: WordPress Goes Dark Against SOPA and PIPA as 3.3.1 Fixes an XSS Flaw
January 2012 saw WordPress.org and WordPress.com join the SOPA and PIPA blackout, the 3.3.1 security release, a DreamHost breach and the Year of the Meetup.
WordPress Goes Dark Against SOPA
And PIPA as 3.3.1 Fixes an XSS Flaw
January 2012 was the month WordPress went political. The project usually stayed out of politics, but on January 10 it urged users to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), and on January 18 WordPress.org and WordPress.com joined the Internet Blackout Day protest. Within days, both bills were shelved.
It was also a busy month for security. WordPress 3.3.1 arrived on January 3 to fix a cross-site scripting flaw in 3.3, and hosting company DreamHost reset passwords for all its customers after a database breach. The month ended on a community note, with the project declaring 2012 the “Year of the Meetup.”
Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments
No acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in the WordPress ecosystem in January 2012.
WordPress Core Updates
- WordPress 3.3.1 (January 3): The first maintenance release for 3.3 fixed 15 issues and patched a cross-site scripting vulnerability that affected version 3.3.
- Planning 3.4: Following December’s core team meetup on Tybee Island, work began on WordPress 3.4, which would focus on themes and making it easier to customise a site’s look.
Other WordPress News
- Help Stop SOPA/PIPA (January 10): The official blog called on readers to contact lawmakers, noting that the project usually avoided politics because of its global user base but considered these bills an exception.
- Internet Blackout Day (January 18): WordPress.org joined the protest, arguing that the bills threatened internet freedom. WordPress.com blacked out its homepage for more than 24 hours and gave bloggers options to add a ribbon or black out their own sites.
- Year of the Meetup (January 27): The project declared 2012 the Year of the WordPress Meetup, encouraging local groups of bloggers, business users, developers and consultants. WP Tavern reported that the WordPress Foundation would pay Meetup.com organiser fees for official groups.
- The Daily Show: Jon Stewart gave WordPress and Tumblr a mention on The Daily Show, a sign of how familiar the name had become.
- Theme reviewers wanted: The volunteer Theme Review Team, which checked every theme submitted to the directory, appealed for more reviewers to keep up with demand.
Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities
- WordPress 3.3.1: The XSS flaw in 3.3 was reported responsibly by Joshua H., Hoang T., Stefan Zimmerman, Chris K. and the Go Daddy security team. Users of 3.3 were urged to update.
- DreamHost breach: Around January 20, DreamHost detected unauthorised access to one of its database servers and reset the FTP and shell passwords for all customers. Reports said web panel, email and billing details were not affected, but researchers later found spam pages planted on hundreds of DreamHost-hosted sites. For the many WordPress users on DreamHost, it was a reminder to use strong, unique passwords and to check their files.
Industry Trends and Insights
The SOPA and PIPA blackout was a turning point for online activism. Wikipedia, Reddit, Google and many others joined WordPress in protest, and within days the Senate postponed its vote on PIPA and SOPA was pulled. For WordPress, it showed that a platform powering so much of the web could have real political weight when it chose to use it.
- The CMS market: Joomla released version 2.5 on January 24, a long-term support release, keeping up the pressure in the open source CMS space.
- Hosting security: The DreamHost breach, following Automattic’s own server break-in the previous April, kept attention on the security of hosting infrastructure, not just the software running on it.
Theme of the Month: Builder
Builder, the theme framework from iThemes, let users design layouts with a visual layout editor and assign different layouts to different parts of a site. With WordPress 3.4 set to focus on theme customisation, Builder showed the kind of design control site owners were starting to expect.
Plugin of the Month: ManageWP Worker
ManageWP Worker connected WordPress sites to ManageWP, Vladimir Prelovac’s service for managing many sites from a single dashboard, including one-click updates and backups. In a month dominated by security updates, tools that made it easy to update dozens of sites at once were especially valuable to agencies and freelancers.
Host of the Month: Rackspace
Rackspace’s managed servers and cloud hosting were a common choice for large WordPress sites that had outgrown shared hosting. As high-traffic publishers moved to WordPress, hosts that could offer dedicated support and scalable infrastructure played an important role.
Founder of the Month: Vladimir Prelovac
Vladimir Prelovac, the Serbian developer behind ManageWP and several popular plugins, was interviewed by WP Tavern in late January about building his business. ManageWP was one of the first services to tackle the problem of looking after many WordPress sites at once.
Looking Ahead to February 2012
February was expected to bring more work on WordPress 3.4 and its theme-focused features, along with the first official meetup groups under the new WordPress Foundation programme.
