WordPress News Roundup May 2011: WordPress 3.1.3 Release

May 2011 marked the start of the WordPress 3.2 testing cycle. The first beta arrived on May 12, almost three months after WordPress 3.1, with a clear message: this release was about making WordPress faster and lighter rather than adding big new features. A security release for the 3.1 branch followed later in the month.

On the business side, WordPress.com landed one of its largest migrations yet. Major League Baseball moved its fan blogging network from Movable Type to WordPress.com, bringing around 15,000 blogs onto the platform. The month also marked WordPress’s eighth birthday on May 27.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No acquisitions or investments were announced in the WordPress ecosystem in May 2011. The biggest commercial news was the MLB migration to WordPress.com, covered below.

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress 3.2 Beta 1 (May 12): The first beta focused on performance. As usual, the team warned that it was not meant for live sites.
WordPress 3.1.3 and 3.2 Beta 2 (May 25): WordPress 3.1.3 was a security release for all previous versions, shipped alongside the second 3.2 beta.
New minimum requirements: WordPress 3.2 would be the first version to require PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0, ending support for PHP 4. It would also drop support for Internet Explorer 6 in the dashboard.
Twenty Eleven: The 3.2 development cycle also brought Twenty Eleven, a new default theme built on HTML5, which would replace Twenty Ten when 3.2 shipped.

Other WordPress News

MLB joins WordPress.com: Major League Baseball moved its blogging system from Movable Type to WordPress.com, bringing about 15,000 blogs across. WordPress.com VIP already hosted blogs for the NFL, the NBA and NBC Sports.
WordCamp San Francisco call for speakers (May 31): Organisers of the annual conference opened applications for speakers, noting that past speakers had included core developers, business owners, bloggers and people from related open source projects.
The WordPress economy: Mullenweg pointed readers to a long article in The Next Web surveying the businesses built around WordPress, from theme shops to consultants, and how newcomers could get involved.
Eight years of WordPress: WordPress turned eight on May 27, counting from its first release in 2003.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

WordPress 3.1.3 was the month’s key security update. It bundled several fixes rather than a single headline flaw.

What it fixed: The release included general security hardening, hardening for taxonomy queries and fixes for media security, with credit to several contributors.
Username exposure: It also stopped canonical redirects from revealing the usernames of users who were not authors, a small but useful step against attackers who guess usernames before trying passwords.
Who should update: The release applied to all earlier versions, and users on 3.1 were advised to update promptly.

Industry Trends and Insights

The MLB move was part of a wider shift away from Movable Type, once WordPress’s main rival among serious publishers. Big media and sports organisations were increasingly choosing WordPress, either hosted on WordPress.com VIP or run on their own servers, because of its plugin ecosystem and the number of developers who knew it.

Raising the floor: By requiring PHP 5.2.4, WordPress used its size to push hosts to upgrade. Because so many sites ran WordPress, the change affected the shared hosting industry as a whole.
Performance first: The decision to make 3.2 a speed-focused release reflected growing concern about page load times, both for users and for search rankings.

Theme of the Month: Shelf

Shelf, from The Theme Foundry, was one of the first two premium themes sold on WordPress.com when the marketplace opened in February. Its clean presentation suited writers and small businesses, and by May it was a good example of how independent theme shops were finding new customers on the hosted platform.

Plugin of the Month: Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 was one of the most installed plugins in the directory in 2011. It offered a flexible, free way to add contact forms with simple markup, and it worked well with spam protection tools such as Akismet and CAPTCHA plugins.

Host of the Month: WordPress.com VIP

WordPress.com VIP was the enterprise hosting arm of Automattic, serving clients such as the NFL, the NBA and NBC Sports. Bringing Major League Baseball’s blogs onto WordPress.com in May showed that the platform could handle very large networks, not just single high-traffic sites.

Founder of the Month: Takayuki Miyoshi

Takayuki Miyoshi, the Japanese developer who created Contact Form 7, maintained one of WordPress’s most widely used plugins largely on his own. His work was a reminder that much of the WordPress ecosystem rested on individual open source contributors around the world.

Looking Ahead to June 2011

With two betas out, WordPress 3.2 was heading towards release candidates in June. WordCamp San Francisco speaker applications would keep coming in, and plugin and theme developers were being asked to test their work against the new PHP and MySQL requirements before 3.2 shipped.