WordPress News Roundup May 2009: WordPress 2.8 Betas and the WordPress MU Merger Announcement

May 2009 delivered both a beta cycle and a turning point. WordPress 2.8 entered public testing with Beta 1 on May 16 and Beta 2 a week later, and on May 30 Matt Mullenweg used his State of the Word address at WordCamp San Francisco to announce that WordPress and WordPress MU would be brought together into a single codebase.

The merger news would take more than a year to deliver, eventually landing in WordPress 3.0, but it reframed the roadmap overnight. Around it, WordPress.org kept publishing its contributor series, Automattic announced a translation tool called GlotPress, and the WordCamp calendar was the busiest it had ever been.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 2.8 Beta 1: Released on May 16 with a call for testers to download it and file bugs.
• WordPress 2.8 Beta 2: Followed on May 23 with a list of changes since Beta 1. The headline features under test were the redesigned widgets screen, installing themes from the dashboard and a faster admin.
• Usability testing: A May 4 post in the contributor series credited usability testing for much of 2.7’s success, tracing it back to the 2.5 cycle and the “Crazyhorse” prototype.
• How features get in: On May 9 a further post addressed frustration over feature requests, pointing to the Ideas forum and explaining that core decisions rested with the project’s small group of core developers.

Other WordPress News

• WordCamp San Francisco: The flagship event on May 30 drew more than 700 attendees from 32 countries. In the State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg said the WordPress and WordPress MU codebases would be merged, without committing to a version at the time. The announcement caused some confusion over what “merge” meant for existing MU networks, and WP Tavern rounded up the day’s other news.
• GlotPress announced: A new web-based translation tool, GlotPress, was unveiled as the planned replacement for the patchwork of desktop tools translators were using.
• Regional WordCamps: WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Columbus and WordCamp Mid-Atlantic all took place in May, and WordCamp Chicago was set for early June.
• Meetups grow: Local groups such as the Northeast Ohio WordPress meetup were giving hands-on previews of 2.8, showing how the project’s grassroots network was spreading.
• Small Potato returns: Tung Do, the designer known as Small Potato, resurfaced to discuss the sale of WPDesigner.com.
• Documentation: Spectacu.la released a 56-page PDF user guide for WordPress 2.7.

Industry Trends and Insights

The merger decision was a recognition that multi-site publishing was no longer niche. WordPress.com, Edublogs and a growing number of university and corporate networks ran on MU, and maintaining two parallel codebases was slowing everyone down. Folding the features into core promised that any WordPress site could become a network.

• Release cadence: A WP Tavern listener poll asked how users felt about going six months between 2.7 and 2.8, reflecting a wider debate over how often a mature platform should ship major versions.
• The GPL fatigue: Licensing arguments about premium themes had dominated forums and blogs for weeks, and some commentators were calling for the community to move on. The issue would return in July.
• Twitter everywhere: One widely shared list counted 52 plugins for bringing Twitter into WordPress, showing how quickly social integrations had become expected.

Theme of the Month: Hybrid

Justin Tadlock’s free Hybrid framework, along with child themes such as Hybrid News, was a leading example of the parent-and-child theme approach that was gaining ground in 2009. Developers trying it in May were discovering both the power and the learning curve of building on a framework rather than editing a theme directly.

Plugin of the Month: Front-end Editor

scribu’s Front-end Editor let logged-in users edit posts and other content directly on the live site instead of switching to the admin screens. Reviewed by WP Tavern at the end of April, it captured a growing wish, also visible in BuddyPress themes, for WordPress to feel less like a back office and more like the page itself.

Host of the Month: HostGator

Houston-based HostGator was one of the largest budget shared hosts and a common choice for bloggers running several WordPress sites on one account. With 2.8 promising theme installs from the dashboard, affordable hosts that supported WordPress’s automatic file operations were becoming a selling point in their own right.

Founder of the Month: Matt Mullenweg

WordPress’s co-founder set the project’s direction for the next year in a single talk. His WordCamp San Francisco announcement that WordPress and WordPress MU would merge eventually led to multisite in WordPress 3.0, and the State of the Word itself was posted to WordPress.tv in June.

Looking Ahead to June 2009

June was expected to bring a release candidate and then the final release of WordPress 2.8, once the remaining beta bugs were cleared. WordCamp Chicago in early June and WordCamp Dallas later in the month were the main events on the calendar.