WordPress News Roundup March 2011: Jetpack Launches as WordPress.com Weathers Its Largest DDoS Attack

March 2011 was about Automattic more than about core. On March 9 the company launched Jetpack, a plugin that brought WordPress.com features such as stats and sharing to self-hosted sites. It began as a secret internal project code-named “JP” and went on to become one of the most widely installed plugins in WordPress history.

The month had started badly. On March 3, WordPress.com was hit by the largest and most sustained denial-of-service attack in its six-year history, slowing or knocking offline blogs across the network. A week later the WordPress community gathered in Austin for South by Southwest, the festival that had played a part in the project’s early days.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress-related acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in March 2011.

WordPress Core Updates

There was no core release in March. WordPress 3.1 had shipped on February 23, and the team spent the month fixing bugs reported against it while early planning began for WordPress 3.2, which would focus on making WordPress faster and lighter.

• Google Summer of Code: On March 30 the project announced that it had again been accepted as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code, and invited college students interested in WordPress development to apply.

Other WordPress News

• Jetpack launches (March 9): Automattic released Jetpack 1.0, built by a small team inside the company. The first version bundled WordPress.com Stats, a Twitter widget, shortcode embeds, the Sharedaddy sharing buttons and wp.me shortlinks, all free and enabled by connecting a site to WordPress.com.
• WordPress at SXSW: Mullenweg sat down with John Battelle on stage to discuss the future of WordPress, and Automattic co-hosted an invite-only WordPress party with the Wall Street Journal and HostGator. The official blog reported that WordPress was more visible than ever at the festival, and video of Mullenweg’s conversation with Battelle at the Signal Austin event was published soon after.
• Google’s magazine runs WordPress: Google UK’s new publication, Think Quarterly, launched on WordPress, one of several high-profile media sites to choose the platform that year.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

The denial-of-service attack on WordPress.com on March 3 was the month’s main security event. It affected the hosted service rather than self-hosted WordPress sites.

• Scale: The attack hit all three of Automattic’s data centres, in Chicago, San Antonio and Dallas, with traffic measured in multiple gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.
• Impact: Many WordPress.com blogs were slow or unreachable during the attack. Mullenweg called it the largest and most sustained attack the service had seen.
• Motive: Mullenweg said the attack may have been politically motivated against one of the network’s non-English blogs, though that was never confirmed.

Industry Trends and Insights

Jetpack marked a change in how Automattic thought about self-hosted WordPress. Rather than treating WordPress.com and WordPress.org as separate worlds, the company began offering cloud services to every WordPress site through a single connection. That approach would later carry features like backups, security and image delivery to millions of self-hosted sites.

• Feature parity: Users had long complained that WordPress.com had stats and sharing tools that self-hosted users had to assemble from several plugins. Jetpack was Automattic’s answer.
• Browsers: Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 on March 14, bringing better support for HTML5 and CSS3. It strengthened the case for dropping very old browsers such as IE6, which WordPress 3.2 would do in July.

Theme of the Month: Thematic

Thematic, the free theme framework created by Ian Stewart, was a popular foundation for child themes in early 2011. Its hooks and widget areas let developers build custom designs without editing the parent theme, an approach that was becoming standard practice as WordPress sites grew more complex.

Plugin of the Month: Jetpack

Jetpack was the clear pick. In one plugin, self-hosted users got the stats, sharing and embed tools WordPress.com users already enjoyed, with more features promised in later versions. Its launch in March was the start of a product that would shape the plugin landscape for the rest of the decade.

Host of the Month: HostGator

HostGator, one of the largest shared hosting companies of the era, co-hosted the WordPress party at SXSW alongside Automattic and the Wall Street Journal. Its affordable plans and one-click WordPress installs made it a common home for new self-hosted sites.

Founder of the Month: Collis Ta’eed

Collis Ta’eed, co-founder of Envato, ran the company behind ThemeForest, by then one of the largest marketplaces for premium WordPress themes. As WordPress.com began selling premium themes and more businesses looked for ready-made designs, marketplaces like his were becoming a major part of the WordPress economy.

Looking Ahead to April 2011

April was expected to bring the first maintenance release for WordPress 3.1, along with continued planning for 3.2. Google Summer of Code student applications were open into early April, and the spring and summer WordCamp season was about to begin.