WordPress News Roundup June 2009: WordPress 2.8 “Baker” Brings New Widgets and Dashboard Theme Installs

June 2009 was release month. WordPress 2.8, codenamed “Baker” after jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, shipped on June 11 after a six-month cycle, bringing a rebuilt widgets screen, theme installation from the dashboard, syntax highlighting in the code editors and a noticeably faster admin. More than 790 bugs were fixed along the way.

The rest of the month followed the familiar post-release rhythm: a 2.8.1 maintenance release entered beta within two weeks, the core team set new minimum requirements for 2.9, and the community gathered in Dallas to hear another State of the Word.

WordPress Core Updates

• Release date set: A June 3 developer meetup fixed June 10 as the target for 2.8 and pushed non-blocking tickets to later releases.
• Release Candidate 1: Declared feature-complete on June 7, RC1 gave testers a final chance to report serious problems before launch.
• WordPress 2.8 “Baker”: Released on June 11, a day after the June 10 target, 2.8 let users search the theme directory and install a theme from the dashboard in one click, added syntax highlighting and function documentation links to the theme and plugin editors, and introduced a redesigned widgets interface with multiple instances, drag-and-drop between sidebars and storage for inactive widgets. A new Screen Options tab on every admin page let users adjust layouts, and changes to script and style loading made the dashboard faster. The announcement cited more than 790 bug fixes and over 180 changes in total.
• New requirements for 2.9: The same June 3 meeting announced that WordPress 2.9 would require MySQL 4.1.2 or later, up from 4.0, with version checks added to the automatic upgrader.
• WordPress 2.8.1 betas: Beta 1 arrived on June 21 to fix problems that surfaced after launch, including issues with certain themes, and Beta 2 followed on June 26 with a request for plugin developers to test against it.

Other WordPress News

• WordCamp Dallas: Matt Mullenweg delivered a State of the Word at WordCamp Dallas (June 27–28), and the event was live-streamed for remote viewers.
• San Francisco keynote online: The WordCamp San Francisco State of the Word, including the WordPress and WordPress MU merger announcement, was published on WordPress.tv on June 21.
• WordCamp Chicago: The Chicago event took place on June 6–7, continuing a run of US regional WordCamps.
• BuddyPress maintenance: BuddyPress 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 shipped in June, fixing issues found after April’s 1.0 launch.
• A virtual WordCamp: Organisers proposed an online-only WordCamp that anyone in the world could attend, an idea that drew both interest and criticism over pricing in the weeks that followed.
• WordPress.com versus WordPress.org: Community polls and podcast discussions highlighted how many users still did not understand the difference between the hosted service and the self-hosted software.
• Mobile blogging: The WordPress iPhone app, first released in 2008, was getting fresh attention as the new iPhone 3G S reached users in June.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

June carried no core security advisory. The 2.8.1 maintenance release was still in beta at the end of the month; when it shipped in July it turned out to include a fix for plugin admin screens that could be reached by unprivileged users.

Industry Trends and Insights

Installing themes from inside the dashboard put the WordPress.org theme directory in front of every user, giving free, GPL-licensed themes a distribution advantage that commercial sellers could not match. At the same time, raising the MySQL requirement showed the project was prepared to leave very old server setups behind.

• PHP 5.3 arrives: PHP 5.3.0 was released on June 30, adding namespaces and closures. WordPress still supported PHP 4 at the time, so plugin authors could not yet rely on the new features.
• Widgets as a design tool: The new widgets screen made sidebars far easier to manage, increasing the value of widget-ready themes.

Theme of the Month: Sandbox

Sandbox, the minimalist theme by Andy Skelton and Scott Allan Wallick, was famous for its rich semantic CSS classes and served as a base for countless designs. As 2.8 made theme switching easier than ever, its approach of separating structure from style was a reminder of where the theme framework idea had come from.

Plugin of the Month: Google XML Sitemaps

Arne Brachhold’s Google XML Sitemaps generated a sitemap that search engines could crawl, rebuilding it automatically whenever content changed. WordPress would not ship native sitemaps for another decade, so for many site owners upgrading to 2.8 this was an essential install.

Host of the Month: Linode

Linode’s virtual private servers were a popular step up for developers whose WordPress sites had outgrown shared hosting. With PHP 5.3 just released and WordPress raising its database requirements, a VPS gave technical users control over exactly which versions they ran.

Founder of the Month: Charles Stricklin

Charles Stricklin created The WordPress Podcast, one of the earliest regular shows about the software, and he was interviewed on WordPress Weekly in June about his work and the craft of podcasting. Shows like his helped turn release news into a community conversation.

Looking Ahead to July 2009

July was expected to bring the final 2.8.1 release and the start of planning for WordPress 2.9, with developers already discussing which features to tackle. Theme developers were also watching for further guidance on how the GPL applied to their work.