WordPress News Roundup May 2007: WordPress 2.2 “Getz” Brings Widgets Into Core

After a short delay, WordPress 2.2 “Getz” arrived on May 16, 2007, and its headline feature changed how people customised their sites. Widgets, previously a plugin, were now part of core, letting users rearrange sidebars by dragging and dropping. The release came under a new, faster development cycle, just four months after 2.1.

The rest of May had a celebratory feel. WordPress was approaching its fourth anniversary, WordPress.com was closing in on one million blogs, and the community gathered in San Francisco to mark both.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in May.

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress 2.2, named for tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, shipped on May 16 with more than two hundred bug fixes.

• Widgets in core: Drag-and-drop widgets were built in and enabled for the default themes.
• Atom everywhere: Feeds moved to the Atom 1.0 specification, and an Atom Publishing Protocol interface joined XML-RPC for remote publishing.
• Blogger importer: Posts and comments could be imported from the latest version of Blogger with just a login.
• Safer plugin activation: WordPress now refused to activate a plugin, or save a file edit, that would break the site.
• Developer changes: New WordPress-specific XML-RPC methods, more internal use of jQuery, comment feeds in multiple formats, phpMailer for SMTP support, and database character set and collation settings in wp-config.php.
• Support policy: The 2.1 branch was no longer supported, so 2.1 users needed to upgrade. The next major release was planned for September.

Other WordPress News

• Birthday party: Matt Mullenweg invited the community to a party on May 21 in San Francisco to celebrate 2.2, WordPress.com nearing one million blogs and WordPress’s fourth anniversary.
• HyperDB announced: On May 28, Mullenweg announced HyperDB with a new mailing list to discuss an enterprise database class for WordPress, the kind of multi-server setup needed at WordPress.com’s scale.
• Webware 100: WordPress was in the running for CNET’s Webware 100 awards, and Mullenweg asked readers to vote.
• Notable launches: Guy Kawasaki’s rumour site Truemors launched on WordPress, and in a separate essay Mullenweg pushed back on the idea of WordPress as an “overnight success,” pointing to four years of steady work by contributors and companies.
• Press coverage: Mullenweg sat down with CNET for a two-part video interview covering 2.2, statistics and Akismet.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

WordPress 2.2 included several security fixes, and with the 2.1 branch retired, upgrading was the only supported path for 2.1 users. In early June, a SQL injection flaw in 2.2’s XML-RPC interface that any logged-in user could exploit (CVE-2007-3140) was disclosed publicly and later fixed in 2.2.1, so sites with open user registration were the most exposed. Registration was switched off by default.

Industry Trends and Insights

Widgets turned site layout into something non-developers could control, a shift that put WordPress ahead of many rivals on ease of customisation. The broader web was moving the same way: Facebook opened its platform to outside developers at the end of May, and embeddable widgets of all kinds were becoming a standard part of personal sites.

Theme of the Month: Classic

WordPress’s bundled Classic theme, a simpler alternative to Kubrick, was one of the default themes that came widget-ready in 2.2. For users experimenting with widgets for the first time, it offered a plain canvas to try the new drag-and-drop sidebar.

Plugin of the Month: Widgets

Automattic’s Sidebar Widgets plugin was the reason 2.2’s headline feature felt familiar to many users. Its graduation into core showed how a successful plugin could prove an idea before WordPress adopted it.

Host of the Month: WordPress.com

Automattic’s hosted service was nearing one million blogs by mid-May, less than two years after launch. HyperDB, announced this month, reflected the kind of database work needed to keep that growth running smoothly.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

With WordPress four years old, its co-founder marked the occasion by shipping 2.2, throwing a party for the community and opening a public discussion of HyperDB, an enterprise database class for scaling WordPress.

Looking Ahead to June 2007

June was expected to bring a 2.2.1 maintenance release, results from the Webware 100 vote and more detail on the second WordCamp San Francisco. Work also began on the next major version, due in September.