WordPress News Roundup July 2010: The Thesis GPL Showdown Ends in a Split License as WordPress 3.0.1 Ships

July 2010 was dominated by a fight over licensing. Matt Mullenweg and Chris Pearson, creator of the Thesis theme, took their long-running disagreement over whether WordPress themes must be GPL to a live debate on Mixergy in mid-July. Days later, on July 22, Pearson announced that Thesis would move to a split license, with its PHP code under the GPL.

The month also brought milestones and planning. WordPress 3.0 passed three million downloads and the plugin directory passed 100 million on July 1, the project announced it would drop PHP 4 and MySQL 4 after 3.1, and WordPress 3.0.1 closed the month with around 50 fixes.

WordPress Core Updates

• Downloads milestone: On July 1 WordPress 3.0 passed three million downloads and the plugin directory reached 100 million downloads. WordPress.org said it would spend the following two months improving the WordPress.org site itself.
• PHP 4 and MySQL 4 end of life: On July 23 the project announced that WordPress 3.1, due late in 2010, would be the last version to support PHP 4 and MySQL 4. WordPress 3.2, planned for the first half of 2011, would require PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0.15. At the time, about 11 percent of installs ran PHP older than 5.2 and fewer than 6 percent used MySQL 4.
• WordPress 3.0.1: Released on July 29, 3.0.1 fixed about 50 minor issues. The announcement noted nearly 11 million downloads of 3.0 in its first 42 days.
• Patches Welcome: Core developer Peter Westwood launched a site of tutorials and resources for people wanting to contribute to WordPress core.

Other WordPress News

• The Mixergy debate: On July 14 Andrew Warner of Mixergy hosted Mullenweg and Pearson in a live interview. Mullenweg argued that Thesis was a derivative of WordPress and should respect its license; Pearson maintained that his theme was his own work and not a derivative. The conversation was widely watched and later posted to WordPress.tv.
• Thesis goes split licensed: On July 22 Pearson announced that Thesis’s PHP would be released under the GPL while its CSS, images and other design assets would remain under a separate license, the arrangement WordPress.org had described as acceptable a year earlier.
• The future of bbPress: Matt Mullenweg wrote that bbPress’s future lay inside WordPress, pointing toward rebuilding the forum software as a plugin.
• Matt Cutts on WordPress: Google’s Matt Cutts discussed blogging with WordPress on the WordPress Community podcast.
• Framework comparisons: With the Thesis debate in the news, discussions of which theme framework to use, Genesis, Hybrid and others, multiplied.
• Akismet refresh: Akismet asked users for testimonials while it redesigned its website.
• The Theme Foundry story: Drew Strojny told WP Tavern how he got into theme design and founded The Theme Foundry.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

July had no core security advisory; 3.0.1 was a maintenance release. Brute-force login attempts were a recurring concern on community sites, and WP Tavern reported that the Limit Login Attempts plugin had blocked repeated failed logins on its own site over the preceding weeks, a reminder that 3.0’s custom admin usernames were only one layer of defence.

Industry Trends and Insights

The Thesis resolution settled the main practical question raised by the 2009 GPL opinion. The largest commercial theme holding out against the GPL had accepted a split license, and other theme businesses took note. In the weeks that followed, some users switched to GPL-licensed frameworks, and Automattic began replacing older WordPress.com themes associated with Pearson.

• Dropping old PHP: Setting a date to leave PHP 4 behind was welcome news for plugin and theme developers, who had been writing code for an environment PHP itself had long abandoned.
• Scale: 100 million plugin downloads and roughly 11 million 3.0 downloads in six weeks showed how large the WordPress audience had become.

Theme of the Month: Hybrid

Justin Tadlock’s Hybrid framework was free, fully GPL and built around child themes, and it was singled out for praise in July’s framework discussions. In the month Thesis conceded the licensing argument, Hybrid was an example of a framework that had never needed to.

Plugin of the Month: Limit Login Attempts

Limit Login Attempts locked out IP addresses after repeated failed logins, blunting the password-guessing attacks that targeted WordPress’s standard login page. Simple and effective, it was a common recommendation for anyone hardening a site in 2010.

Host of the Month: WP Engine

WP Engine, founded in Austin earlier in 2010, offered hosting built exclusively for WordPress, with performance tuning, backups and security handled by the host. As 3.0 brought businesses to WordPress, its premium managed model was finding an audience.

Founder of the Month: Chris Pearson

Chris Pearson, creator of Thesis and co-founder of DIYthemes, was the month’s central figure. His decision on July 22 to adopt a split license, less than a week after the Mixergy debate, ended the most public licensing dispute in WordPress history, though his relationship with WordPress’s leadership remained strained.

Looking Ahead to August 2010

August was expected to bring work on the WordPress.org site, early discussion of what WordPress 3.1 should include, and more summer WordCamps, including the first WordCamp Houston and WordCamp Montreal.