WordPress News Roundup July 2017: React License Fight Escalates as 10up Buys Lift UX

After a hectic June, July 2017 was calmer for WordPress core. WordPress 4.8 had rolled out smoothly, so contributors turned to building infrastructure: weekly meetings for new core contributors, a dedicated focus on PHP practices, and steady Gutenberg releases. WordPress.org also launched its Month in WordPress roundup, a new monthly summary of project news.

Outside core, July’s headlines were about licensing and deals. Developers petitioned Facebook to relicense React after the Apache Software Foundation banned its BSD-plus-patents license, a fight with direct consequences for Gutenberg, while 10up, AJ Morris and SiteLock all completed acquisitions.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• 10up acquires Lift UX: On July 11, agency 10up acquired Lift UX, adding a respected design and development team to one of the largest WordPress agencies.
• AJ Morris acquires iThemes Exchange: iThemes sold its Exchange e-commerce plugin to AJ Morris, letting iThemes concentrate on products such as BackupBuddy and iThemes Security.
• SiteLock acquires Patchman technology: Security company SiteLock bought Patchman’s malware and vulnerability detection technology and said the deal expanded its WordPress customer base to 4 million.

WordPress Core Updates

No core release shipped in July, but WordPress 4.8.1 was in final preparation.

• New contributor meetings: The Core team started weekly meetings on Wednesdays at 19:00 UTC to help newcomers find good first bugs.
• PHP focus: A new #core-php channel and weekly meeting began on Mondays, with early proposals for warning users about outdated PHP versions and letting plugins and themes declare PHP requirements.
• Custom HTML widget: 4.8.1 was set to add a dedicated Custom HTML widget after users found that the new rich Text widget’s visual mode could alter code pasted into it.
• Gutenberg iterations: Gutenberg 0.5.0 added a Verse block for poetry and a recent blocks display, and 0.6.0 at the end of the month changed paragraph behavior and added Cover Text and Read More blocks. Contributors also explored drag and drop and multi-column layouts.

Other WordPress News

• Month in WordPress: On July 3, Hugh Lashbrooke published the first Month in WordPress roundup on the official blog.
• Meetup growth: In the roughly one month after 4.8 added the events widget, 31 new meetup groups formed with 15,647 new members, compared with 19 groups and 7,071 members in the same period a year earlier.
• Remembering Jesse Petersen: The community mourned Jesse Petersen, founder of Genesis The.me, who passed away in early July. Friends had rallied to fund his family’s medical leave in the spring.
• WordCamp Europe aftermath: Organizers reported a 24% no-show rate for Paris, citing early ticket sales and the expensive location.
• Net neutrality: Automattic joined Amazon, GitHub, Mozilla, reddit and Twitter in the July 12 protest against the FCC’s plans and released a plugin so WordPress sites could take part.
• Asia plans: Organizers began planning WordSesh Asia for 2018, with a first WordCamp Asia targeted for 2019.
• Automattic products: Jetpack’s Professional plan added unlimited access to more than 200 commercial themes, WordPress.com introduced scheduling for social posts, the new Aztec editor for the mobile apps entered beta, and the .blog domain passed 100,000 registrations.
• WangGuard closes: The developer of WangGuard shut down the splog-hunting service, citing the trauma of reviewing abusive content and death threats.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• bbPress 2.5.13: The forum plugin re-added sanitization of anonymous user data that had gone missing, and forum owners were advised to update.
• Security consolidation: SiteLock’s purchase of Patchman technology reflected how commercial security vendors were racing to cover more WordPress sites at the hosting level.
• Core: No core vulnerabilities were disclosed in July.

Industry Trends and Insights

• React licensing: After the Apache Software Foundation banned dependencies under React’s BSD-plus-patents license, developers petitioned Facebook to change it, and the petition was escalated to Facebook’s engineering directors. For WordPress, which was building Gutenberg in React, the outcome mattered enormously.
• Flash’s end date: Adobe announced it would stop updating and distributing Flash at the end of 2020, giving WordPress another reason to remove legacy Flash-based components.
• HTTPS growth: Let’s Encrypt passed 100 million certificates issued and said wildcard certificates would arrive in January 2018.
• GPL enforcement: CoKinetic Systems filed a $100 million GPL violation case against Panasonic Avionics, another sign that open source licenses were being tested in court.

Theme of the Month: Hamilton

Hamilton, a free portfolio theme from Anders Norén, launched in July for photographers, illustrators and designers. Its clean grid and focus on images were typical of Norén’s work, which had made his free themes some of the most admired on WordPress.org.

Plugin of the Month: Members

Justin Tadlock’s Members 2.0 added a capability registration system and a new settings screen for add-ons. For site owners who needed fine control over user roles, it remained the go-to free option, and the update modernized a plugin that had been around for years.

Host of the Month: Cloudways

Cloudways offered managed WordPress hosting on top of cloud providers such as DigitalOcean and AWS. As core’s new PHP focus pushed site owners toward modern PHP versions, platforms that let users pick their own stack without managing servers became an attractive middle ground.

Founder of the Month: Jake Goldman

Jake Goldman, founder and president of 10up, grew his agency again in July with the acquisition of Lift UX. 10up had become one of the largest enterprise WordPress agencies and a major contributor to core and open source tools, and the deal strengthened its design and user experience work.

Looking Ahead to August 2017

WordPress 4.8.1 was due in early August with the new Custom HTML widget and Text widget fixes. Gutenberg was approaching version 1.0, and the community was waiting to see whether Facebook would respond to the React petition.

WordCamp for Publishers was set for August 17–19 in Denver, and WordCamp US volunteer applications opened at the start of the month.