WordPress News Roundup July 2011: WordPress 3.2 “Gershwin” Ships Faster and Lighter with Twenty Eleven

July 2011 delivered the second major release of the year right on schedule. WordPress 3.2, named in honour of George Gershwin, shipped on July 4 with a refreshed dashboard, a distraction-free writing mode and the new Twenty Eleven default theme. It was also the release that left PHP 4 and Internet Explorer 6 behind for good.

The month brought a milestone too. At WordCamp Montreal, Matt Mullenweg marked WordPress passing 50 million websites. And in the hosting world, GoDaddy, one of the biggest hosts of WordPress sites, agreed a deal with a group of private equity firms that valued it at around $2.25 billion.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• GoDaddy and KKR (July 1): GoDaddy announced a strategic investment from KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures. The companies did not disclose terms, but media reports valued the deal at about $2.25 billion. Founder Bob Parsons was set to stay on with a minority stake. Given how many WordPress sites ran on GoDaddy hosting and domains, the deal mattered to the ecosystem.

WordPress Core Updates

• Getting ready (July 3): A day before the release, the team reminded users that 3.2 would require PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0, so site owners should check their hosting before upgrading.
• WordPress 3.2 “Gershwin” (July 4): The fifteenth major release focused on making WordPress faster and lighter. It brought a refreshed dashboard design, a redesigned full-screen writing mode, more admin bar shortcuts, an “approve and reply” option for comments, and faster updates that replaced only changed files.
• Twenty Eleven: 3.2 introduced Twenty Eleven, a fully HTML5 default theme with rotating header images and several layout options.
• Clearing out the old: The release retired support for PHP 4, older MySQL versions and legacy browsers such as Internet Explorer 6. The team closed more than 400 tickets, and the post noted that WordPress 3.1 had passed 15 million downloads.
• WordPress 3.2.1 (July 12): After more than a million downloads of 3.2, the first maintenance release fixed a JSON-related incompatibility on some servers, plus issues in the new dashboard design and Twenty Eleven.

Other WordPress News

• Fifty million: On July 11 Mullenweg wrote that WordPress had passed 50 million websites, a figure called out by an audience member during his town hall session at WordCamp Montreal.
• The FCC’s first plugin: The US Federal Communications Commission released its first WordPress plugin, a faceted search widget, as open source. Mullenweg hoped to see it in the plugin directory.
• Boing Boing switches: The popular blog Boing Boing moved from Movable Type to WordPress, using Disqus for comments.
• WordCamp San Francisco speakers: Organisers said they had received more than 200 speaker applications and would also reach out to strong speakers who had not applied.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

July was a relatively quiet month for security. WordPress 3.2.1 was a maintenance release rather than a security fix. The bigger security gain came from 3.2 itself: by dropping PHP 4 and very old browsers, WordPress could rely on more modern and safer platforms. Plugin developers were still working through the lessons of June’s backdoor incident and the forced WordPress.org password reset.

Industry Trends and Insights

WordPress 3.2 showed the project using its size to move the web forward. Ending PHP 4 support pushed hosts to upgrade their servers, and dropping IE6 made it easier for theme and plugin developers to use modern HTML and CSS.

• HTML5 by default: Twenty Eleven brought HTML5 markup to every new WordPress install, helping make it the norm for themes.
• Private equity in hosting: The GoDaddy deal showed that large investors saw web hosting and domains, much of it powering WordPress sites, as a valuable and stable business.
• Moving away from Movable Type: Boing Boing’s move continued the shift of big blogs from Movable Type to WordPress seen earlier in the year with Major League Baseball.

Theme of the Month: Twenty Eleven

Twenty Eleven was the obvious pick. Shipped as the default with WordPress 3.2, it offered HTML5 markup, rotating header images, a showcase page template and support for Post Formats. For millions of new sites, it became the first theme they saw.

Plugin of the Month: Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms, from Rocketgenius, had become the leading premium form builder for WordPress. Its drag-and-drop editor, conditional logic and add-ons for payments and email marketing made it a standard tool for agencies building business sites on WordPress.

Host of the Month: GoDaddy

GoDaddy earned the spot for the month’s biggest business news. As one of the largest domain registrars and hosts in the world, it served a huge number of WordPress users, and its new owners were expected to invest in growing the hosting business.

Founder of the Month: Carl Hancock

Carl Hancock, co-founder of Rocketgenius, helped build Gravity Forms into one of the most successful commercial plugins of its time. Its success showed that a premium plugin business could thrive alongside the free directory.

Looking Ahead to August 2011

August would bring WordCamp San Francisco, from August 12 to 14, and Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word address, the usual moment for fresh numbers on WordPress’s growth. Work on WordPress 3.3 was also set to begin in earnest.