WordPress News Roundup June 2008: WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 Previews Post Revisions and Press This

June 2008 was quiet on the official WordPress blog, but development moved quickly. On June 24, Ryan Boren announced WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 for testers, previewing post revisions and the Press This bookmarklet. WordPress.com added XML sitemaps for every blog, BuddyPress showed off a new theme, and more high-profile media sites moved to WordPress.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress-related acquisitions or investments were announced in June.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 (June 24): Lead developer Ryan Boren released the first beta of 2.6 to testers. Early coverage focused on post revisions, which would record every change to a post or page, and Press This, a bookmarklet for quickly posting from any web page.
• Current version: WordPress 2.5.1 remained the stable release throughout June.

Other WordPress News

• XML sitemaps on WordPress.com: WordPress.com launched XML sitemaps for all users, helping search engines find every post on hosted blogs. Matt Mullenweg mentioned it in a post inviting friends using Typepad to try WordPress.
• BuddyPress theme preview: Mullenweg shared a preview of a new BuddyPress theme, three months after Automattic took on the project.
• Magento integration: A plugin linking the Magento e-commerce platform with WordPress drew attention as interest grew in combining blogs with online stores.
• Top Gear on WordPress: A Top Gear site joined the roster of WordPress.com VIP customers, as Mullenweg noted on June 22.
• Brickhouse meetup: A WordPress meetup at Yahoo’s Brickhouse in San Francisco was announced for the end of the month.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security releases were published in June. The 2.6 beta did point toward security changes ahead, including fuller SSL support and remote publishing switched off by default, which arrived with the final release in July.

Industry Trends and Insights

Browsers and devices were changing fast. Mozilla released Firefox 3 in mid-June, and Apple’s iPhone App Store was due to open in July, raising the question of how bloggers would publish from phones. Within weeks, WordPress would have an answer of its own.

Search visibility was another theme. Built-in sitemaps on WordPress.com showed that features once provided only by SEO plugins were becoming part of the platform, at least on the hosted side.

Theme of the Month: BuddyPress Theme

The new BuddyPress theme previewed this month gave the social networking project a polished front end for profiles and member pages, a key step in making BuddyPress usable by site owners who were not developers.

Plugin of the Month: Google XML Sitemaps

While WordPress.com users got sitemaps automatically, self-hosted sites still relied on plugins. Arne Brachhold’s Google XML Sitemaps remained the standard choice, generating and updating sitemap files whenever content changed.

Host of the Month: WordPress.com

Adding sitemaps for every blog was a small change with broad reach, and it gave Mullenweg a fresh argument when inviting Typepad users to switch.

Founder of the Month: Ryan Boren

One of WordPress’s longest-serving lead developers, Ryan Boren shepherded the 2.6 beta into testers’ hands this month. The release it previewed would end up shipping ahead of its planned schedule.

Looking Ahead to July 2008

July was expected to bring the final WordPress 2.6 release after further betas. The opening of Apple’s App Store, and with it the prospect of native iPhone publishing apps, was also on the horizon.