WordPress News Roundup November 2016: WordPress Passes 27% of the Web and Nashville Wins WordCamp US

November 2016 brought a new milestone for WordPress’ reach. W3Techs data showed WordPress powering 27.1% of all websites, up from 25% a year earlier, as the project prepared to ship WordPress 4.7 with a full REST API and a business-focused default theme.

The community also looked ahead. Nashville was chosen to host WordCamp US for 2017 and 2018, the second Global WordPress Translation Day set new records, and Automattic’s .blog domain extension moved towards general availability, not without controversy over its landrush process.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No significant acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in November. The month’s business story was a cautionary one: Upvato, a backup service for Envato Market products, was terminated by its storage provider, and the company confirmed that customers’ backup files were lost and that it planned to relaunch on a new provider.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 4.7 betas: Beta 2 arrived on November 4, Beta 3 on November 11 and Beta 4 on November 16.
• Release candidate: Published on November 24, with the team hoping to ship on Tuesday, December 6.
• Features confirmed: A custom CSS editor in the Customizer, visible edit shortcuts that let users click to edit parts of their site in the preview, and PDF thumbnail previews in the media library were among the features previewed during the month. 4.7 also improved accessibility by removing alternative text fallbacks that produced unhelpful alt attributes.
• Feature cut: A new way to search, preview and install themes inside the Customizer was removed from 4.7 because it was not ready.
• Plugin guidelines: The Plugin Review Team published its revamped guidelines for the directory on November 7.

Other WordPress News

• Nashville for WordCamp US: On November 15, WordPress announced that Nashville, Tennessee, would host WordCamp US in 2017 and 2018, following two years in Philadelphia.
• 27% of the web: WordPress passed 27% market share according to W3Techs, and WP Tavern noted that the project was banking on the Customizer to drive further growth.
• Translation Day records: The second Global WordPress Translation Day on November 12 brought together 780 translators across 133 locales.
• .blog landrush: Automattic clarified its .blog landrush process after allegations of a bait and switch from some applicants, ahead of general availability later in the month.
• Kim Parsell scholarship: Elizabeth Shilling was awarded the 2016 Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship to attend WordCamp US.
• Surveys and summits: The 2016 WordPress user survey opened, BuddyPress 2.8 development began alongside a developer survey, and the Community Team proposed a new selection process for 2017 Community Summit attendees.
• Events: WordCamp Orlando took place on its rescheduled dates of November 12 and 13 after Hurricane Matthew, WordCamp US livestream tickets went on sale, and PressNomics 5 was scheduled for April 6 to 8, 2017, in Phoenix.
• A notable relaunch: Andy Baio relaunched his long-running blog Waxy.org on WordPress.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• WP eCommerce 3.11.4: Patched an SQL injection vulnerability on November 14.
• Upvato data loss: Not a vulnerability, but a data-protection lesson: customers of the Upvato backup service lost their stored backups when its storage provider terminated the account.
• Skype phishing: WP Tavern warned readers about malicious links to Baidu circulating in Skype messages at the start of the month.
• Quiet for core: There was no WordPress security release in November as testing focused on 4.7.

Industry Trends and Insights

WordPress’ climb from 25% to more than 27% of the web in a year showed that growth was continuing despite a crowded market of hosted site builders. Yet the project’s leaders were increasingly concerned about those competitors, and the focus on the Customizer, visible edit shortcuts and starter content in 4.7 was a direct effort to make WordPress easier for first-time users.

The Upvato episode reinforced an old rule: backups are only as safe as the place they are stored, and a backup service that depends on a single provider can fail all at once. For agencies and freelancers, it was a reminder to keep independent copies of critical client data.

Theme of the Month: Genesis Framework

StudioPress’s Genesis Framework remained one of the most widely used foundations for professional WordPress sites in 2016. With StudioPress putting WooCommerce compatibility on the roadmap for its new themes in the autumn, Genesis was adapting to the growing number of sites that combined content and commerce.

Plugin of the Month: UpdraftPlus

In a month when a hosted backup service lost its customers’ files, UpdraftPlus stood out for letting site owners send backups to storage they controlled, from Dropbox and Google Drive to Amazon S3. It had become one of the most installed backup plugins on WordPress.org.

Host of the Month: DreamHost

DreamHost, one of the four hosts on WordPress.org’s recommended list, had been among the first to offer one-click Let’s Encrypt certificates. Weeks later, WordPress.org announced it would only recommend hosts offering HTTPS by default, a standard DreamHost was already well placed to meet.

Founder of the Month: Andy Baio

Andy Baio, co-founder of the XOXO festival and a long-time independent blogger, relaunched Waxy.org on WordPress in November. His decision to return to a self-hosted blog was a small but telling vote of confidence in the open web at a time when many writers were moving to centralised platforms.

Looking Ahead to December 2016

December was set to be another big month: WordCamp US in Philadelphia from December 2 to 4 with Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word, followed by WordPress 4.7 on December 6, featuring Twenty Seventeen and the REST API content endpoints. WordCamp Europe was also due to open applications for its 2018 host city.