WordPress News Roundup November 2007: WP Super Cache Debuts as WordPress 2.4 Work Continues

November 2007 was one of the quietest months of the year for official WordPress news. There were no releases and no posts on the WordPress blog, as developers worked on the large admin changes planned for WordPress 2.4. The ecosystem still had news: Donncha Ó Caoimh released the first version of WP Super Cache, Matt Mullenweg floated a theme marketplace for WordPress.com, and a high-profile hack underlined the cost of running old versions.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in November.

WordPress Core Updates

No core releases shipped this month. WordPress 2.3.1, released in late October, remained the current version. Development focused on 2.4, which was still planned for December and involved significant changes to the admin area. As events turned out, that schedule would not hold.

Other WordPress News

• WP Super Cache 0.1: On November 5, Donncha Ó Caoimh released WP Super Cache, a modification of the older WP-Cache plugin that generated static HTML files so busy blogs could serve pages without running PHP for every visitor.
• A theme marketplace for WordPress.com: Mullenweg described a proposed theme marketplace for WordPress.com, which he had previewed at WordCamp Argentina, and followed up with figures showing the WordPress.com themes page had received 2.4 million pageviews the previous month.
• BlogWorld Expo: WordPress users met up in Las Vegas during BlogWorld Expo on November 8, and Mullenweg gave a video interview to WebProNews at the show.
• Press: SF Weekly ran a feature on WordPress and open source, and the new WordPress For Dummies book began drawing reviews.
• Facebook fan page: An official WordPress fan page appeared on Facebook at the end of the month.
• Nonprofit use: Wikimedia’s fundraising blog was running on WordPress.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

There were no new WordPress security releases in November. The month’s cautionary tale came from a hacked climate-campaign website linked to Al Gore. Mullenweg pointed out that the site was running WordPress 2.0.4, a release from July 2006 that had been followed by many security updates. The lesson was the one the 2.3 update notifications were meant to teach: unpatched sites were the easiest targets.

Industry Trends and Insights

Performance was becoming a mainstream concern. As social news sites like Digg sent sudden floods of traffic to individual posts, shared-hosting blogs often buckled. Caching plugins that served static files moved from niche tools to standard advice, and WP Super Cache would become one of the most widely used answers. The proposed theme marketplace, meanwhile, showed Automattic exploring ways for designers to earn money from WordPress.com’s huge audience.

Plugin of the Month: WP Super Cache

Version 0.1 of WP Super Cache made a simple promise: turn dynamic WordPress pages into static files and let the web server do the rest. For bloggers on modest hosting, that could be the difference between surviving a traffic spike and going offline.

Founder of the Month: Donncha Ó Caoimh

Already known as the creator of WordPress MU, the Automattic developer added WP Super Cache to his list of contributions this month. Both projects addressed the same underlying problem: making WordPress work at scale.

Looking Ahead to December 2007

December was supposed to bring WordPress 2.4. With major admin work started only in late October and the holidays approaching, observers were watching to see whether the release date would stick.