WordPress News Roundup November 2009: WordPress 2.8.6 Release, WordPress 2.9 Enters Beta and Wins Best Open Source CMS

November 2009 was the month WordPress 2.9 became real for testers. After a series of community bug hunts, the first beta appeared in mid-November, giving users an early look at the trash feature, the built-in image editor and easier video embeds that had topped the summer’s feature vote.

It was also a month of recognition. WordCamp NYC drew more than 700 people by preliminary count, and on November 18 WordPress was named Overall Best Open Source CMS in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards for the first time. In between, WordPress 2.8.6 fixed two security issues affecting sites with untrusted authors.

WordPress Core Updates

• Bug hunts: The first November bug hunt for 2.9 was under way on November 7, with developers asked to run tests and help clear tickets.
• WordPress 2.8.6: Released on November 12, 2.8.6 fixed two security issues that could be exploited by logged-in users with posting privileges. The release credited Benjamin Flesch and Dawid Golunski and advised upgrading for any site with untrusted authors.
• WordPress 2.9 Beta 1: The first beta of 2.9 was announced to developers around November 16–17, and testers were already running it on live sites within days.
• What 2.9 promised: The beta included a trash for posts, pages and comments with restore, image cropping, rotating and scaling, oEmbed support for pasting video URLs, batch plugin updates and post thumbnails for themes. It also raised the minimum MySQL version to 4.1.2.

Other WordPress News

• WordCamp NYC: The November 14–15 event in New York attracted over 700 attendees by preliminary count, and a group photo of core contributors was taken at the close. Matt Mullenweg gave an interview on site, and Six Apart’s Anil Dash was among the attendees.
• Best Open Source CMS: WordPress won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award at the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards, its first win in that category.
• Six more WordCamps: On November 6 WordPress.org listed six WordCamps still scheduled before the end of the year.
• Gravity Forms 1.3: Rocketgenius shipped Gravity Forms 1.3 on November 23 with new features including notification routing.
• iThemes Builder beta: iThemes was testing Builder, a framework intended to let users assemble layouts without code.
• Alex King on business models: On WordPress Weekly, Alex King discussed his WPHelpCenter support service, the Carrington framework and building businesses on GPL software.
• Student newsrooms move to WordPress: CoPress, whose team included Daniel Bachhuber, was helping college newspapers such as the Fairfield Mirror migrate to WordPress from proprietary systems.
• BuddyPress themes multiply: New free BuddyPress themes and frameworks appeared, including a Thematic-based option, as developers adapted to the 1.1 theme system.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

WordPress 2.8.6 was the only core security release of the month. Both issues required a logged-in account with posting rights, so single-author blogs were at little risk, but multi-author publications and sites that accepted outside contributors were urged to upgrade promptly. The release continued a pattern of frequent, narrowly scoped fixes through the 2.8 branch.

Industry Trends and Insights

The CMS award captured a shift that had been building all year: WordPress was no longer being judged only as blogging software, but as a general-purpose content management system competing with Drupal and Joomla. Student newspapers, hyperlocal news projects and agencies were all choosing it for sites that had little to do with personal blogging.

• Frameworks as products: Builder, Carrington and other frameworks pointed toward a future in which non-developers would design sites visually on top of WordPress.
• The cost of free: Debates on podcasts and forums about how GPL businesses could earn a living were becoming more practical and less ideological.

Theme of the Month: Builder

iThemes’ Builder was in beta in November, offering a layout editor that let users arrange modules on a page from the dashboard. WP Tavern’s Jeff Chandler, testing it that month, wondered whether such tools could eventually put some theme developers out of business, a question that would recur for years.

Plugin of the Month: Ajax Edit Comments

Ronald Huereca’s Ajax Edit Comments let commenters fix their own typos for a short time and let administrators moderate comments from the front end. Huereca explained how to get the most from it in a WP Tavern guest post in November, shortly before the plugin moved to a paid model.

Host of the Month: GoDaddy

As the world’s largest domain registrar, GoDaddy was also where many new site owners first bought hosting, often bundled with a domain. That made it one of the most common places WordPress was installed by people with no technical background, and a key environment for the project’s push to make upgrades painless.

Founder of the Month: Alex King

Alex King, founder of Crowd Favorite and one of WordPress’s earliest contributors, was building businesses on top of GPL software through the Carrington framework and the WPHelpCenter support service. His November interview offered a clear-eyed view of how WordPress professionals could make a living.

Looking Ahead to December 2009

December was expected to bring further 2.9 betas, a release candidate and, if testing went well, the final release before the end of the year. WordCamp Orlando was on the calendar in early December, and core committers planned to meet there to discuss the project’s longer-term direction.