WordPress News Roundup July 2007: WordCamp San Francisco Goes Two Days as PHP 4 Nears End of Life

July 2007 had no WordPress release, but it had the community’s biggest gathering of the year. WordCamp San Francisco returned on July 21–22, now stretched over two days, and drew press coverage and plenty of follow-up posts. Away from the event, WordPress.com reached into Facebook, Automattic updated its stats plugin, and the PHP project set an end date for PHP 4, a decision with long consequences for WordPress hosting.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress-related deals were announced in July.

WordPress Core Updates

There were no core releases this month. Development of the next major version, with built-in tagging and update notifications, continued ahead of a planned first beta later in the summer.

Other WordPress News

• WordCamp San Francisco 2007: The second WordCamp ran on July 21–22. Informal meetups were organised for the Friday before, local station KRON covered the event, and Matt Mullenweg gathered attendee roundups afterward.
• WordPress.com on Facebook: A WordPress.com Facebook application launched, bringing WordPress.com blogs into Facebook just weeks after the social network opened its platform.
• Stats plugin 1.1: Automattic released an updated WordPress.com Stats plugin, bringing WordPress.com’s hosted statistics to self-hosted blogs.
• International shirts: The official WordPress store began shipping outside the United States and added a red shirt design.
• Installation screencast: Mullenweg shared a screencast walking through a WordPress install, part of a wider push to make getting started less daunting.
• WordPress MU communities: A social network built on WordPress MU showed the multi-site software being used well beyond blog hosting.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

July was quiet for core security, with no advisories or releases. The bigger concern was spam: The Guardian reported on spam blogs, and Mullenweg wrote about the overlap between spammers, sponsored themes and the work Akismet was doing to keep comment sections clean.

Industry Trends and Insights

On July 13 the PHP project announced that PHP 4 would get no new releases after December 31, 2007, with security fixes only until August 8, 2008. Mullenweg wrote “On PHP” the same day. WordPress still supported PHP 4 because so many hosts ran it, and the announcement started a long transition for the shared hosting market.

Theme licensing also stayed in the spotlight. In “Price of Freedom”, Mullenweg discussed the GPL and the footer links that theme authors were adding, and he wrote separately about theme quality and download numbers.

Plugin of the Month: WordPress.com Stats

The Stats plugin connected self-hosted blogs to WordPress.com’s analytics, giving site owners simple traffic charts without installing heavy tracking software on their own servers. Version 1.1 arrived on July 26.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

Mullenweg hosted WordCamp for the second year, took a public position on PHP’s future and kept arguing for GPL-friendly themes, all while Automattic shipped new tools for both WordPress.com and self-hosted users.

Looking Ahead to August 2007

August was expected to bring the first beta of the next major release, with tags and update notifications leading the feature list, along with WordPress.com’s second birthday. The Weblog Tools Collection plugin competition was also due to name its winners.