WordPress News Roundup November 2011: WP Engine Raises $1.2 Million and WordPress.com Unveils WordAds

November 2011 was a month of money and momentum. Managed WordPress host WP Engine closed a $1.2 million Series A round on November 15, with Automattic taking a strategic stake. Two weeks later WordPress.com announced WordAds, an advertising programme built with Federated Media that Automattic positioned as a better deal for bloggers than Google AdSense.

Core development kept pace. WordPress 3.3 went through its third and fourth betas, with all major tickets closed by the end of the month. Automattic also passed a symbolic milestone, reaching 100 people.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• WP Engine Series A (November 15): WP Engine raised $1.2 million in Series A financing led by Austin firm Silverton Partners, whose partner Kip McClanahan joined the board. Angel investors included Eric Ries, Loic Le Meur, Dharmesh Shah, Jeremy Benken, Bill Boebel and Rob Walling.
• Automattic’s stake: Automattic made a strategic investment in WP Engine and announced a VIP Support for Web Hosts partner programme, with WP Engine as the launch partner.
• WP Engine’s scale: At the time, WP Engine said it hosted more than 30,000 WordPress blogs and sites, with plans starting at $50 a month.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 3.3 Beta 3 (November 8): Beta 3 came after 200 commits since Beta 2. The team said the betas were no longer adding features, only fixing bugs and polishing.
• Widgets when switching themes: On November 20 the project asked for feedback on a 3.3 change meant to reduce the pain of re-arranging widgets after switching between themes with different widget areas.
• WordPress 3.3 Beta 4 (November 24): Beta 4 fixed many bugs, cleaned up the interface and replaced placeholder text on several screens. With all major tickets closed, the team said a release candidate was close.

Other WordPress News

• WordAds announced (November 29): WordPress.com introduced WordAds, an advertising programme run with Federated Media. It was not open to everyone at first, with bloggers invited to apply, and a broader rollout was expected in early 2012.
• Automattic reaches 100: On November 11 Mullenweg wrote that Automattic had just reached 100 people, and expected to be at 102 by the following Monday, all working in a distributed way.
• WordPress and veterans: On November 11, Veterans Day in the US and Remembrance Day in much of Europe, the official blog revisited photojournalist Teru Kuwayama’s WordCamp San Francisco talk on Basetrack, a WordPress-powered project reporting on a US Marine battalion in Afghanistan.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No core security release or major plugin vulnerability was announced in November 2011. The 3.3 betas were the main thing to test, and the team repeated its usual advice to run them only on test sites. For site owners on shared hosting, the growth of managed WordPress hosts such as WP Engine offered another option: hosting companies that handled updates, backups and malware scanning on their customers’ behalf.

Industry Trends and Insights

WP Engine’s funding was an early sign that investors believed in managed WordPress hosting as a category. Instead of competing on price with shared hosts, companies like WP Engine sold speed, security and expert support to businesses that depended on WordPress. Automattic’s investment gave the model a powerful endorsement.

• Monetisation for bloggers: WordAds was Automattic’s attempt to give WordPress.com users a revenue share from better-quality ads, and to keep advertising on the network under its own control.
• Remote work at scale: Automattic reaching 100 people without a traditional office was becoming a talking point well beyond WordPress, as other companies began to look at distributed teams.

Theme of the Month: Canvas

Canvas, from WooThemes, was a flexible premium theme designed to be customised through its options panel rather than code. With WooCommerce launched in September, WooThemes also released a WooCommerce child theme for Canvas, making it a natural choice for anyone building a shop on WordPress that autumn.

Plugin of the Month: Google XML Sitemaps

Arne Brachhold’s Google XML Sitemaps plugin generated sitemaps that helped search engines find every page on a WordPress site. Years before WordPress added sitemaps to core, it was one of the most installed plugins in the directory and a standard part of most SEO setups.

Host of the Month: WP Engine

WP Engine was the clear pick. Its Series A and Automattic’s strategic investment gave it the resources to grow its team and support, and its role as launch partner for VIP Support for Web Hosts tied it closely to the company behind WordPress.com.

Founder of the Month: Jason Cohen

Jason Cohen, the Austin entrepreneur who founded WP Engine, had bet that businesses would pay more for hosting built only for WordPress. The November funding round proved investors agreed, and set WP Engine on a path to becoming one of the largest companies in the WordPress ecosystem.

Looking Ahead to December 2011

With Beta 4 out and major tickets closed, WordPress 3.3 was expected to reach release candidate status in early December and to ship before the end of the year, which would complete Mullenweg’s goal of three major releases in 2011.