WordPress News Roundup November 2013: MP6 and Twenty Fourteen Merge for WordPress 3.8 as Crowd Favorite Is Acquired

November 2013 was decision month for WordPress 3.8. In a marathon meeting on November 4, Matt Mullenweg and the feature plugin leads decided what would make the cut: the MP6 admin redesign, the Twenty Fourteen theme, a new themes screen and a widget area chooser. By November 21 it was all in Beta 1, on schedule for a December 12 release.

The business side of WordPress was just as busy. The first major acquisition of a WordPress consultancy was announced, a managed host rebranded, and agencies began paying people to work on core full-time.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• VeloMedia acquires Crowd Favorite: Crowd Favorite, the enterprise WordPress consultancy founded by Alex King, agreed to be acquired by VeloMedia, as announced on November 15; the deal closed in February 2014. Alex King became CTO of the combined company and Karim Marucchi remained CEO. It was one of the first significant acquisitions of a WordPress agency.
• ZippyKid becomes Pressable: On November 14 ZippyKid, founded by Vid Luther in 2010, rebranded as Pressable. Its investors included Rackspace co-founders Pat Condon and Dirk Elmendorf and Automattic.

WordPress Core Updates

• Features chosen for 3.8: The November 4 meeting gave the green light to MP6, Twenty Fourteen, the THX38 themes screen redesign and the Widgets Area Chooser. A global admin search (Omnisearch) was judged to need more work. The merge window closed on November 13.
• Sass in core: WordPress adopted the Sass CSS preprocessor for its admin styles, a practical choice for managing MP6’s colour schemes.
• Twenty Fourteen in the wild: Twenty Fourteen, a magazine-style theme with featured-content grids and sliders, became available to test ahead of 3.8.
• WordPress 3.8 Beta 1: Beta 1 arrived on November 21 with the new responsive admin design, refreshed colour schemes, a new dashboard homepage, a completely different theme browser and Twenty Fourteen. More than 250 issues had been closed, code freeze was set for December 5 and release for December 12.
• Language packs: Developers were shown how to prepare plugins and themes for language packs delivered from WordPress.org, building on 3.7’s translation updates.

Other WordPress News

• 10up sponsors Helen Hou-Sandí: Agency 10up announced it would sponsor core developer Helen Hou-Sandí to work full-time on WordPress core, an early example of a company funding core work directly.
• Matt at the Joomla World Conference: Matt Mullenweg gave a keynote at the Joomla World Conference, a notable gesture between rival open-source CMS communities.
• Zeldman joins Automattic’s advisers: Jeffrey Zeldman, founder of Happy Cog, joined an Automattic advisory board.
• Plugin and product launches: Gravity Forms 1.8 entered beta with a new API, bbPress 2.5 added forum subscriptions and importers, Jetpack 2.6 introduced uptime monitoring, iThemes launched its Sync service for managing many sites, and WordPress.com added Markdown support.
• BuddyPress 1.9 beta: BuddyPress 1.9 entered beta, retiring the old default theme and adding a notifications component.
• GoDaddy teases managed WordPress: GoDaddy hinted at an upcoming managed WordPress hosting product late in the month.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• Themify framework: Themify disclosed that an insecure file, themify-ajax.php, in framework version 1.2.1 and below was being used by attackers to upload files. A fix had been released a year earlier, but the auto-updater had failed to delete the vulnerable file, so users were told to replace their theme folders entirely.
• Access in China: Gravatar and WordPress.com were blocked in China, and site owners there were advised on settings to avoid slow page loads caused by blocked requests.
• DMCA abuse: Automattic said WordPress.com would stand with its users against abusive DMCA takedown notices.

Industry Trends and Insights

• Agencies become acquisition targets: Crowd Favorite’s sale showed that WordPress consultancies had become valuable businesses in their own right.
• Paid core contributors: 10up’s sponsorship of Helen Hou-Sandí set a precedent other companies would follow in 2014.
• Drupal learns from WordPress: Drupal discussed release-cycle changes inspired in part by WordPress’s regular schedule.

Theme of the Month: Twenty Fourteen

Twenty Fourteen broke with tradition by giving the default theme a magazine layout, with a featured-content grid or slider, three widget areas and a dark, high-contrast look. Designed by Takashi Irie and adapted for core, it was the most ambitious default theme yet.

Plugin of the Month: Query Monitor

John Blackbourn’s Query Monitor drew attention this month as one of the most thorough debugging plugins available, showing database queries, hooks, HTTP calls and errors for each page. It quickly became a staple of WordPress developers’ toolkits.

Host of the Month: Pressable

Pressable, the new name for ZippyKid, promised features to simplify publishing in 2014 and counted Automattic among its investors. The rebrand marked its move from a small managed host to a company with broader ambitions.

Founder of the Month: Alex King

Alex King was one of WordPress’s earliest contributors and the founder of Crowd Favorite. Its acquisition by VeloMedia this month showed how far the businesses built around WordPress had come, and King stayed on as CTO to keep its focus on craftsmanship.

Looking Ahead to December 2013

Code freeze for WordPress 3.8 is set for December 5, with the release planned for December 12. BuddyPress 1.9 is due in December, and WordCamps in Las Vegas and Sevilla close the year. GoDaddy’s managed WordPress offering could also launch soon.