WordPress News Roundup November 2015: Automattic Unveils Calypso as WordPress Hits 25% of the Web

November 2015 gave the WordPress world a glimpse of a different future. On November 23, Automattic unveiled Calypso, a completely rebuilt WordPress.com interface written in JavaScript with React and Node, talking to sites entirely through the REST API. It was open source from day one and shipped alongside a new desktop app for the Mac.

The month also saw WordPress pass a quarter of the web by W3Techs’ count, WordPress 4.4 reach its release candidate, and the most popular SEO plugin rename itself with a major, and bumpy, 3.0 release.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

• Aesop Interactive sold: Nick Haskins sold Aesop Interactive LLC, including Aesop Story Engine, the Editus front-end editor and Story.am, to an anonymous East Coast buyer with no known ties to the WordPress community. Haskins said the price came close to his $100,000 asking price.
• Businesses for sale: WP Remote, a site management service, was put up for sale, and the Pro Plugin Directory began looking for a new owner.
• Crowdfunding WP-CLI: Daniel Bachhuber raised more than $17,500 on Kickstarter to develop a RESTful version of WP-CLI, a successful contrast to the failed crowdfunding campaigns earlier in the year.

WordPress Core Updates

• More betas: WordPress 4.4 Beta 3 arrived on November 4 and Beta 4 on November 12.
• Release candidate: Published on November 25, with the team aiming to ship 4.4 on Tuesday, December 8.
• A field guide: Core contributors published a field guide to 4.4’s major features, from responsive images and post embeds to term meta and the REST API infrastructure, so developers could test their code ahead of release.
• Active installs for themes: The Theme Directory replaced download counts with active install figures on November 25.

Other WordPress News

• Calypso: Matt Mullenweg described Calypso as a new approach to WordPress: a JavaScript client for WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected sites, with all development happening in the open on GitHub. Windows and Linux desktop apps were promised, and early reviews suggested applications like it could be the future of the WordPress admin.
• 25% of the web: W3Techs data showed WordPress powering a quarter of the top 10 million websites, a milestone celebrated widely across the community.
• Yoast SEO 3.0: Released on November 18, the plugin formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast took a new name and introduced real-time content analysis in the post editor. The launch was rough, with a series of quick point releases needed to fix bugs.
• BuddyPress 2.4 “Pietro”: Released on November 12 with major accessibility improvements.
• WordCamp Europe 2016 tickets: Tickets for Vienna went on sale on November 12, while WordCamp US still had more than 250 tickets available with weeks to go.
• Jetpack 3.8: Added Google+ badges and fixed contact form response emails.
• Plugin maintenance: An analysis found that nearly half of the plugins in the directory had not been updated in more than two years.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• BuddyPress 2.3.5: Patched a privilege escalation issue on November 11.
• Spam as the top threat: Imperva’s web application attack report found that comment spam was the largest security threat facing WordPress sites.
• Abandoned plugins: The finding that so many plugins went unmaintained for years raised concerns about security, since unpatched code in abandoned plugins was a common route into sites.

Industry Trends and Insights

Calypso crystallised the debate about WordPress’ future. Building the WordPress.com admin as a React application talking to an API suggested that the PHP-rendered wp-admin might one day be replaced, and it gave weight to calls for WordPress developers to learn JavaScript. It also raised questions about how a JavaScript interface would accommodate the thousands of plugins that added screens to wp-admin.

The wider CMS landscape was shifting too. Drupal 8 was released on November 19 after years of development, and PHP 7, promising major speed gains, was due in early December. With WordPress at a quarter of the web, the platform’s choices about JavaScript, APIs and PHP versions now had consequences for a significant share of the internet.

Theme of the Month: Storefront

Storefront, WooThemes’ free theme built specifically for WooCommerce, was the natural starting point for the growing number of WordPress stores in late 2015. With WooCommerce now part of Automattic, Storefront offered an officially supported, extensible base for shops heading into the holiday season.

Plugin of the Month: Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO 3.0 was the most significant update yet to one of WordPress’ most installed plugins, adding real-time content analysis and a new name. The rocky rollout taught a lesson about releasing major changes to more than a million sites at once, and Joost de Valk discussed those lessons publicly soon afterwards.

Host of the Month: WordPress.com

WordPress.com was the platform at the centre of November’s biggest story. Calypso gave its users a faster, app-like experience and gave Jetpack users a new way to manage self-hosted sites, while the open-source code showed developers what an API-driven WordPress admin could look like.

Founder of the Month: Nick Haskins

Nick Haskins, founder of Aesop Interactive, sold his company in November after a year that included a trademark dispute and a rebrand. His Aesop Story Engine had helped popularise long-form, multimedia storytelling on WordPress, and his public account of the sale gave other product founders a rare look at what small WordPress businesses could fetch.

Looking Ahead to December 2015

December was set to be the biggest month of the year: the Community Summit on December 2 and 3, the first WordCamp US in Philadelphia from December 4 to 6 with Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word, and WordPress 4.4 scheduled for December 8. PHP 7.0 was also expected in early December.