WordPress News Roundup November 2012: Jetpack 2.0 Arrives and WordPress 3.5 Reaches Release Candidate
November 2012 brought Jetpack 2.0 with Photon and Infinite Scroll, the first WordPress 3.5 release candidates, PressNomics and John O’Nolan’s Ghost idea.
Jetpack 2.0 Arrives
And WordPress 3.5 Reaches Release Candidate
November 2012 was the home stretch for WordPress 3.5. A third beta on November 13 was followed by the first release candidate on November 22 and a second a week later, with the team aiming to ship in early December. The rewritten media manager was the main reason developers were asked to test their plugins and themes carefully.
Automattic made its biggest Jetpack release yet. Jetpack 2.0, launched on November 8, added Photon image delivery, Infinite Scroll, Post by Email and wider Publicize sharing. The same week, Pagely’s first PressNomics conference brought WordPress business owners together in Arizona, and later in the month a blog post by designer John O’Nolan sparked a debate about whether WordPress had moved too far from blogging.
Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments
No acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in the WordPress ecosystem in November 2012. The business conversation of the month happened at PressNomics, a conference devoted to the economics of WordPress.
WordPress Core Updates
- WordPress 3.5 Beta 3 (November 13): The third beta was released with a strong request for plugin and theme developers to test their code, because media management had been rewritten.
- WordPress 3.5 RC1 (November 22): The first release candidate arrived with a target of shipping the final release in about two weeks.
- WordPress 3.5 RC2 (November 29): RC2 left about a dozen issues to resolve, with the team hoping to release 3.5 the following week. Testers were pointed to the About page for guidance on what to test.
- Getting ready: Late in the month, WP Tavern reported on what developers needed to know about 3.5 and on a call from the documentation team for help preparing for the release.
Other WordPress News
- Jetpack 2.0 (November 8): The release brought Photon, which served a site’s images from WordPress.com’s servers, Infinite Scroll for themes that supported it, Post by Email, and Publicize sharing to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr.
- PressNomics (November 8–10): Pagely’s Joshua Strebel hosted the first PressNomics at the Crowne Plaza San Marcos in Chandler, Arizona, with profits going to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Attendees included Matt Mullenweg.
- Bitcoin on WordPress.com (November 15): WordPress.com began accepting Bitcoin for its paid upgrades, which Mullenweg said could make its premium services available to more people around the world.
- Toni Schneider on TV: Automattic CEO Toni Schneider was interviewed on TechCrunch TV at the end of the month.
Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities
No core security release or major plugin vulnerability was announced in November 2012. WordPress 3.4.2 remained the recommended version for live sites until 3.5 shipped, and users were reminded not to run release candidates on production sites.
Industry Trends and Insights
John O’Nolan’s Ghost concept, published on his blog in November, struck a nerve. O’Nolan, who had been deputy lead of the WordPress user interface team, argued that WordPress had grown into a general-purpose CMS while many people just wanted a simple blogging tool. His mock-ups of a clean, writing-focused platform drew huge attention, and the idea would become the Ghost project, funded on Kickstarter the following year.
- Cloud services for every site: Photon showed how Jetpack could offload work from a site’s own server to WordPress.com’s infrastructure, a model that would grow over the following years.
- New payment options: WordPress.com accepting Bitcoin was one of the earliest moves by a major web company to take the digital currency.
- Elections: The US election on November 6 capped a campaign season in which WordPress powered many candidates’ websites.
Theme of the Month: Coraline
Coraline, a free theme from Automattic’s theme team, offered several column layouts and custom headers and backgrounds in a clean design. It was a good example of the simple, readable blog themes that O’Nolan’s Ghost post argued many writers really wanted.
Plugin of the Month: Jetpack
Jetpack 2.0 was the month’s biggest plugin release. Photon, Infinite Scroll, Post by Email and expanded Publicize gave self-hosted sites features that would otherwise have needed several separate plugins or paid services, all through one connection to WordPress.com.
Host of the Month: WordPress.com
WordPress.com earned the spot for accepting Bitcoin and for powering Jetpack’s new cloud features, from Photon’s image delivery to Publicize. It was increasingly acting as a service layer for self-hosted WordPress, not just a place to host blogs.
Founder of the Month: John O’Nolan
John O’Nolan, a designer and former deputy lead of the WordPress UI team, published the Ghost concept in November. Nearly overnight, his idea for a blogging-only platform became one of the most talked-about topics in the WordPress community, and he would go on to found the Ghost Foundation.
Looking Ahead to December 2012
WordPress 3.5, with its new media manager and Twenty Twelve as the default theme, was expected in the first half of December. Mullenweg was also scheduled to speak at LeWeb in Paris early in the month.
