WordPress News Roundup March 2018: WordPress Passes 30% of the Web as GDPR Work Accelerates

March 2018 gave WordPress a headline number to celebrate: W3Techs reported that it now powered more than 30% of the top 10 million websites. The milestone arrived as the project was preparing for its biggest change in years, with Gutenberg 2.5 shipping and plans for a “Try Gutenberg” prompt to put the new editor two clicks away for millions of users.

Privacy dominated the rest of the month. The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica revelations made online data collection front-page news, and the core GDPR team published its roadmap for tools to help site owners prepare for May 25. WordPress 4.9.5 entered beta, and WordCamp US announced its 2018 dates.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No major WordPress acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in March. After January’s deals, the business conversation shifted to how companies would prepare products for Gutenberg and GDPR.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 4.9.5 beta: The beta arrived on March 21 ahead of a planned April 3 release, with a long list of bug fixes and improvements to the 4.9 branch for testers to check.
• Try Gutenberg plans: Late in the month, the core team said 4.9.5 would include a dashboard prompt that would put Gutenberg two clicks from installation and activation. As it turned out, the prompt was held back and only reached users later in 2018.
• GDPR roadmap: The GDPR Compliance team published its roadmap, covering tools for administrators, a privacy review of plugin guidelines, better privacy standards in core and documentation on best practices. Office hours ran on Wednesdays at 15:00 UTC.
• Gutenberg 2.5: The 2.5 release on March 29 continued improvements to the editing experience. Contributors also sketched ideas for how the Customizer could work with Gutenberg.
• Plugin compatibility: A community project asked for help checking whether 4,500 popular plugins were compatible with Gutenberg, a crowdsourced effort to find problems before the merge.
• Signed updates: A new plugin added cryptographic signature verification to WordPress core updates, reviving the discussion about signed updates first raised on Trac in late 2016.

Other WordPress News

• Jargon glossary: The Marketing team launched a glossary of WordPress terms for newcomers, available as a web page and a PDF.
• WordCamp US 2018: Organizers announced that WordCamp US would return to Nashville on December 7–9.
• Foundation report: The WordPress Foundation published its 2017 annual report, showing how the community had grown.
• Hello Dolly debate: A discussion about the bundled Hello Dolly plugin argued that some of its random lyrics, shown without context in the admin, could read as degrading to women, prompting proposals to filter them.
• Speaker diversity: Yoast launched a fund to help increase speaker diversity at tech conferences by covering costs for speakers from underrepresented groups.
• Events: WordCamp Miami celebrated its tenth year on March 16–18 with a free livestream, WPCampus set its conference for July 12–14 in St. Louis, and WordSesh announced its return in July.
• Legacy PHP: Developers made a public plea for plugin authors to stop supporting very old PHP versions, adding pressure ahead of a minimum PHP version increase in core.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• Drupalgeddon 2: On March 28, Drupal disclosed a highly critical remote code execution flaw (SA-CORE-2018-002) affecting most Drupal sites. It did not affect WordPress, but it was a reminder that every major CMS was a target, and attacks on unpatched Drupal sites started within weeks.
• Core: No core vulnerabilities were disclosed in March. The next security fixes would arrive with 4.9.5 at the start of April.
• Wildcard certificates: Let’s Encrypt began issuing wildcard certificates on March 13, making it simpler for multisite networks with many subdomains to run fully on HTTPS.

Industry Trends and Insights

• 30% of the web: W3Techs’ survey of the top 10 million sites put WordPress above 30% for the first time, roughly ten times the share of its nearest CMS rival.
• Privacy becomes mainstream: The Cambridge Analytica story, which broke in mid-March, turned privacy from a compliance chore into a public concern, strengthening the case for the GDPR team’s work.
• Developer sentiment: Stack Overflow’s 2018 survey still ranked WordPress among the most dreaded platforms to work with, even as its market share kept rising.
• Gutenberg experiences: Early adopters wrote about their first months using Gutenberg for real content, with mixed but increasingly positive results.

Theme of the Month: Divi

Elegant Themes’ Divi, with its built-in visual builder, was one of the most widely used premium themes in 2018. With Gutenberg coming, Divi users and the team behind it were watching closely to see how a block-based editor would sit alongside one of WordPress’s best-known page builders.

Plugin of the Month: Hello Dolly

Hello Dolly, the tiny plugin bundled with WordPress since its earliest days, became an unexpected talking point in March. The debate over its lyrics raised a fair question about how the software presents itself to new users, and led to suggestions for filtering lines that read badly out of context.

Host of the Month: Kinsta

Kinsta’s managed WordPress hosting on Google Cloud Platform continued to win fans among performance-focused site owners. As Let’s Encrypt rolled out wildcard certificates and Chrome prepared to label all HTTP pages as not secure, hosts that made HTTPS simple were increasingly the default choice.

Founder of the Month: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast, saw his company launch a fund in March to help diversify the speaker lineups at tech conferences. Yoast had already used its reach to push PHP upgrades, and the fund was another example of a WordPress business putting resources behind community goals.

Looking Ahead to April 2018

WordPress 4.9.5 was scheduled for April 3, and the GDPR team was expected to start calling for testers for its privacy tools. Gutenberg development was continuing toward its eventual merge in WordPress 5.0.

Camp Press Iceland was set for April 19–22, and planning for WordPress’s 15th anniversary on May 27 was getting underway.