WordPress News Roundup June 2017: WordPress 4.8 “Evans” Ships and Gutenberg Arrives as a Plugin

June 2017 was one of the most eventful months of the year for WordPress. WordPress 4.8 “Evans” shipped on June 8 with new media widgets and a nearby events dashboard widget, WordCamp Europe drew around 1,900 people to Paris, and the new Gutenberg editor became available as a plugin for anyone willing to test it.

The month also set out the roadmap for the rest of the year. Matt Mullenweg confirmed that WordPress 4.9 would focus on editing code and managing plugins and themes, while Gutenberg was targeted for WordPress 5.0. In business news, several small acquisitions showed product companies consolidating in the plugin and theme market.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• WPForms acquires WP Mail SMTP: On June 6, the WPForms team took over WP Mail SMTP, one of the most widely used plugins for fixing WordPress email delivery.
• Imagely acquires TeslaThemes: The company behind NextGEN Gallery bought theme shop TeslaThemes and said it was looking for more acquisition opportunities.
• 9seeds buys a Genesis theme store: 9seeds acquired Web Savvy Marketing’s store of themes for the Genesis Framework.
• Smaller moves: WPShout acquired and updated WPHierarchy.com, and VersionPress launched VersionPress.com to help fund its open source project.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 4.8 “Evans”: Released June 8 and named after jazz pianist Bill Evans. It added Image, Video and Audio widgets, a rich Text widget with visual editing, link boundaries in the visual editor, and an Events and News dashboard widget listing upcoming WordCamps and meetups. Matt Mullenweg and Jeff Paul led the release, with 346 contributors, 106 of them first-timers. 4.8 also ended support for Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10.
• Release candidate 2: RC2 arrived on June 1, a week before launch, with a handful of final changes.
• Roadmap set: On June 16, Matt Mullenweg confirmed that WordPress 4.9 would focus on editing code and managing plugins and themes, and that Gutenberg would get more time as a plugin before landing in what would become WordPress 5.0.
• Gutenberg goes public: On June 22 the new editor became available as a plugin in the WordPress.org directory, followed by version 0.2.0 with Custom HTML and Cover Image blocks and version 0.3.0 at the end of the month. Contributors also published “Why Gutenberg?” to explain the project’s goals.

Other WordPress News

• WordCamp Europe 2017: Held June 15–17 in Paris, the event opened with a Contributor Day followed by two days of talks, and drew about 1,900 attendees from 79 countries. Organizers announced that WordCamp Europe 2018 would take place in Belgrade, Serbia, from June 14 to 16.
• Community Summit: The fourth WordPress Community Summit, an invite-only unconference, took place in the two days before WordCamp Europe, with contribution teams planning the year ahead.
• Underscores revived: Automattic said it would renew work on the Underscores starter theme with a new committer and retire its Components theme generator.
• WordCamp Netherlands reinstated: After March’s decision to phase it out, WordCamp Netherlands was reinstated for 2018.
• WooCommerce changes: WooCommerce 3.1 added a built-in CSV product importer and exporter, while the company dropped its 50% renewal discount on extension subscriptions.
• Marketing push: The Marketing team asked for WordPress case studies and ran a usage survey for users, agencies and freelancers.
• Licensing concerns: Unsplash updated its license, raising questions about compatibility with the GPL for themes that bundled its photos.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• WP Statistics SQL injection: Sucuri disclosed an SQL injection flaw in WP Statistics, a plugin used on more than 300,000 sites, that could be exploited by any logged-in user, including subscribers. The issue was fixed in version 12.0.8.
• Clef shuts down: The Clef two-factor login service reached its announced June 6 shutdown date, and its remaining users needed a new second factor for their logins.
• Core: WordPress 4.8 was a feature release with no new security fixes, and no core vulnerabilities were disclosed during June.

Industry Trends and Insights

• The editor question: Gutenberg’s arrival as a plugin brought the first wave of hands-on reviews. Some praised its ambition, while others worried about meta boxes, shortcodes and page builders, setting up a debate that would run until 5.0 shipped.
• JavaScript frameworks: Vue.js creator Evan You weighed in on WordPress’s framework discussion early in the month, showing how closely the wider JavaScript world was watching.
• Consolidation: June’s string of small acquisitions suggested that mature plugin and theme businesses were increasingly growing by buying established products rather than building new ones.
• Local communities: The events widget in 4.8 put meetups and WordCamps in front of every dashboard user, a change that would quickly show up in meetup sign-ups.

Theme of the Month: Underscores

Underscores, the starter theme behind thousands of custom and commercial themes, got a new lease of life in June when Automattic recommitted to it and added a new committer. With Gutenberg coming, a well-maintained starter theme would be an important place to show developers how themes should adapt.

Plugin of the Month: Gutenberg

The Gutenberg plugin was the most important release of June after 4.8 itself. Its early versions were rough, and the team warned against using them on production sites, but it gave the whole community a chance to try the block-based editor and report problems long before the merge.

Host of the Month: Kinsta

Kinsta, a managed WordPress host built on Google Cloud Platform, was building a reputation for in-depth tutorials and guides on its blog. As Gutenberg arrived as a plugin, hosts that explained changes like this to their customers were becoming important educators in the ecosystem.

Founder of the Month: Syed Balkhi

Syed Balkhi, co-founder of WPBeginner and WPForms, added WP Mail SMTP to his growing portfolio in June. The deal brought a widely used email delivery plugin under the same roof as one of the fastest-growing form builders, and it previewed the acquisition-led strategy his companies would follow for years.

Looking Ahead to July 2017

July was expected to bring WordPress 4.8.1, the first maintenance release of the branch, with fixes for the new Text widget. Gutenberg was on a weekly release cycle, and the JavaScript framework decision was still open.

On the calendar, WPCampus was set for July 14–15 in Buffalo, New York, and Cape Town’s do_action charity hackathon for July 15.