WordPress News Roundup January 2019: WordPress 5.0.3 Release, Josepha Haden Named Executive Director as WordPress 5.1 Enters Beta

January 2019 was the first full month of life with the block editor, and the project used it to settle in and reorganise. WordPress 5.0.3 polished the new editor, WordPress 5.1 moved through three betas, and Matt Mullenweg expanded the project’s leadership by naming Josepha Haden as Executive Director and Joost de Valk as Marketing and Communications Lead.

Outside core, the year opened with a page builder acquisition, Google-backed funding for a new newsroom platform, a security breach at a major commercial plugin vendor, and fresh zero-day attacks. Here is what happened.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• Elementor acquires Layers WP (January 9): Elementor bought the Layers WP theme from Obox, expanding the range of themes built to work with its page builder.
• Newspack funding (January 14): WordPress.com secured $2.4 million from Google and partners to build Newspack, a WordPress-based publishing platform for small and medium-sized news organisations.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 5.0.3 (January 9): A maintenance release with 37 bug fixes and 7 performance updates, focused on fine-tuning the block editor. It added a notice for users with JavaScript disabled and fixed upload issues with common file types such as CSVs.
• WordPress 5.1 Beta 1, 2 and 3: Beta 1 landed on January 11, Beta 2 on January 22 and Beta 3 on January 31.
• Fatal error protection delayed: A new mechanism to catch fatal PHP errors and keep sites accessible, previewed in Beta 1 as “white screen protection,” was moved to 5.2 after unforeseen issues threatened to delay 5.1.
• Site Health beginnings: 5.1 retained the first Site Health mechanisms, including a dashboard warning for sites running outdated PHP versions.
• “Publishing,” not “blogging”: References to blogging in core were updated to talk about publishing, reflecting how WordPress is used today.
• Trac clean-up: Around 2,300 tickets with no activity for two years were closed in a bulk edit.
• Widgets to blocks: Gutenberg phase 2 work focused on converting core widgets into blocks, with a classic widget block in development.

Other WordPress News

• New leadership roles: On January 16, Mullenweg named Josepha Haden as Executive Director, overseeing all contributor teams, and Joost de Valk as Marketing and Communications Lead. Haden followed up with a post on contributors’ strengths and challenges.
• Governance project: A community-led WordPress Governance project was flagged by project leadership as unsanctioned ahead of its first meeting on January 15.
• Coding Standards 2.0: The WordPress Coding Standards project released version 2.0.
• Forum @mentions: The support forums added username autocomplete for @mentions.
• WooCommerce mobile apps: WooCommerce launched new apps for iOS and Android, and WooCommerce Blocks became a feature plugin with six new blocks.
• Jetpack 6.9: Jetpack added blocks for subscriptions, related posts and tiled galleries.
• Accessibility audit vendor: WPCampus selected Tenon LLC to carry out its Gutenberg accessibility audit, with results expected in February.
• Beaver Builder’s response: Beaver Builder said it would double down on serving power users as Gutenberg reshaped the market.
• Plugin team reminder: The Plugin Review team published a reminder about behaviour in the directory and forums.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• WPML website breached: On January 19, the website of the WPML multilingual plugin was hacked and customer email addresses were used to send a message to users. WPML said it believed a former employee was behind the breach and moved to reassure customers about their own sites.
• Total Donations zero-day: On January 25, Wordfence reported sites being compromised through zero-day flaws in the Total Donations plugin, which allowed unauthenticated attackers to change site options. With the plugin effectively abandoned, the advice was to remove it.
• Commercial plugin responsibility: Wordfence used the case to highlight the risks of running commercial plugins that no longer receive updates.

Industry Trends and Insights

• Professionalising leadership: Naming an Executive Director and a marketing lead signalled a project that wanted clearer structures as it grew.
• Page builders adapt: Elementor’s theme acquisition and Beaver Builder’s strategy update showed page builder companies positioning themselves around, rather than against, the block editor.
• Journalism on WordPress: Newspack pointed to a bigger role for WordPress in sustaining local news.
• Developer platforms shift: GitHub made unlimited private repositories free on January 7, a change welcomed by WordPress freelancers and small agencies.
• Mobile commerce: WooCommerce’s new apps reflected store owners’ expectation that they could manage orders from their phones.
• Unsupported PHP: PHP 5.6 reached end of life on December 31 and PHP 7.0 followed on January 10, leaving a large share of WordPress sites on versions that no longer received security fixes. That gap was the reason 5.1’s new PHP warning mattered so much.

Theme of the Month: OceanWP

OceanWP was one of the most popular free multipurpose themes on WordPress.org, prized for its lightweight core, WooCommerce integration and compatibility with page builders. In the first weeks after 5.0, flexible themes that worked with both blocks and builders were in high demand.

Plugin of the Month: CoBlocks

CoBlocks added row and columns blocks for building page layouts in January, turning a block collection into a lightweight page-building toolkit. It was a clear example of how plugin developers were filling gaps in the core editor during its first months.

Host of the Month: Kinsta

Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting, built on Google Cloud Platform, appealed to performance-focused businesses and agencies. Its staging environments and PHP version controls suited a month in which core was encouraging site owners to upgrade from outdated PHP.

Founder of the Month: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk founded Yoast and built Yoast SEO into one of WordPress’s most widely installed plugins. In January he took on the role of WordPress Marketing and Communications Lead, with a remit that included the Marketing team and improvements to WordPress.org.

Looking Ahead to February 2019

WordPress 5.1 is scheduled to reach release candidate in early February, with final release planned for later in the month. The mobile team expects to begin beta testing the block editor in the WordPress apps, and WPCampus’s accessibility audit results are due. Work on porting core widgets to blocks should also reach completion.