WordPress News Roundup June 2012: WordPress 3.4 “Green” Ships with the Theme Customizer as Endurance Buys HostGator

June 2012 brought the first major WordPress release of the year. WordPress 3.4, codenamed “Green” after jazz guitarist Grant Green, shipped on June 13 with a live theme customizer that let users preview design changes before publishing them. It was downloaded three million times in its first two weeks.

The hosting industry saw its biggest deal of the year. HostGator, one of the most popular hosts for WordPress sites, was sold to Endurance International Group. Automattic, meanwhile, shipped Jetpack Comments, and Facebook released an official plugin for WordPress.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• Endurance acquires HostGator (June 21): HostGator founder Brent Oxley announced the sale of the company to Endurance International Group, which already owned Bluehost. The price was widely reported at around $225 million, though it was not officially confirmed at the time. The deal brought two of the most common WordPress hosts under the same owner.

WordPress Core Updates

• Release candidates: RC2 on June 7 brought a few dozen final changes, and RC3 on June 12 fixed remaining issues with live previews, custom headers and backgrounds.
• WordPress 3.4 “Green” (June 13): The release introduced the theme customizer, which let users try out colours, backgrounds and header images on their current theme or one they were considering, without publishing the changes.
• More in 3.4: Users could browse many themes at once without paging, choose header images from the media library and set flexible header sizes, embed tweets by pasting a link on its own line, and use HTML such as links in image captions.
• Under the hood: The release included hundreds of improvements to the XML-RPC, themes and custom header APIs, plus significant performance gains in WP_Query and translations.
• WordPress 3.4.1 (June 27): The maintenance and security release fixed 18 bugs, including page templates that were sometimes not detected, problems with some category permalinks and compatibility issues with PHP 5.2.4 and 5.4.

Other WordPress News

• Jetpack Comments: Alongside the 3.4 release, Jetpack Comments became available to all, letting readers comment using WordPress.com, Twitter or Facebook identities.
• Official Facebook plugin (June 12): Facebook released an official integration plugin in the WordPress plugin directory.
• Retina support: Mullenweg wrote that WordPress sites were getting upgrades for high-resolution “retina” screens, with more to come.
• WordPress in China: Sina began offering WordPress through its cloud service for Chinese users, priced at one yuan a month.
• Nginx and SPDY: Automattic, which had used Nginx since 2008, helped sponsor and debug SPDY support in the web server’s latest release.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• WordPress 3.4.1 fixes: Along with its bug fixes, 3.4.1 closed a potential information disclosure issue and a bug affecting multisite installs with untrusted users, and added further hardening. All users were advised to update.

Industry Trends and Insights

The HostGator deal marked the start of a period of consolidation in shared hosting. Endurance International Group was building a portfolio of hosting brands, and with Bluehost and HostGator it now controlled two of the most widely used hosts for self-hosted WordPress. The effect of that consolidation on service quality would become a recurring debate over the next few years.

• Visual customisation: The theme customizer marked a shift towards editing a site visually. It would later become the foundation for many theme options and, years later, give way to full site editing.
• Social logins: Jetpack Comments and Facebook’s plugin showed how closely WordPress sites and social networks were becoming linked.
• High-resolution screens: Retina displays on new Apple devices were pushing themes and WordPress itself to support sharper images and icons.

Theme of the Month: Graphene

Graphene, a free theme by Syahir Hakim, was one of the directory’s most popular options in 2012, with plenty of layout and colour settings and support for custom headers and backgrounds. Themes with those features worked straight away with the new 3.4 customizer, making it easy for users to see the new tool in action.

Plugin of the Month: Facebook

Facebook’s official plugin, released in June, gave site owners an approved way to add Facebook features such as social publishing and comments to their WordPress sites. Coming from the social network itself, it marked how important WordPress had become as a publishing platform.

Host of the Month: HostGator

HostGator was the month’s headline hosting company. Founded by Brent Oxley in 2002 and built into one of the largest shared hosts, it was a common choice for self-hosted WordPress sites. Its sale to Endurance changed the shape of the budget hosting market.

Founder of the Month: Brent Oxley

Brent Oxley started HostGator from his college dorm room and grew it into one of the biggest hosting companies in the world. Its sale in June 2012, at a reported price of around $225 million, was a remarkable result for a business that began as a one-person operation.

Looking Ahead to July 2012

With 3.4 out, attention turned to WordPress 3.5, expected to bring the delayed Twenty Twelve theme. WordCamp San Francisco on August 4 was getting close, and BuddyPress 1.6 was in beta.