WordPress News Roundup November 2017: WordPress 4.9 “Tipton” Ships With Customizer Drafts and Code Editors

November 2017 was release month. WordPress 4.9 “Tipton” arrived on November 16, after an unplanned third release candidate, with the biggest changes to the Customizer since it was introduced: drafts, scheduling, preview links and design locking, plus syntax highlighting and error protection for code editing. Less than two weeks later, WordPress 4.9.1 fixed four security issues and a page template bug that had frustrated theme developers.

Around core, the ecosystem was preparing for a very different 2018. Gutenberg shipped three releases, privacy tools began appearing ahead of GDPR, and new projects such as Tide and Distributor pointed to better ways to judge and share WordPress code and content.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No major WordPress acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in November. Business news came instead from product changes: Envato Elements added unlimited WordPress theme and plugin downloads to its subscription, the Tailor page builder was discontinued as its owners cited funding, Gutenberg and competition, and Weglot reported passing €44,000 in monthly revenue.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 4.9 “Tipton”: Released November 16 and named after jazz musician and bandleader Billy Tipton. Highlights included drafting and scheduling Customizer changes, shareable preview links, design locking to stop collaborators overwriting each other, syntax highlighting and error checking in CSS and the Custom HTML widget, warnings and fatal error protection in the theme and plugin editors, a new Gallery widget, and an Add Media button in the Text widget. Mel Choyce and Weston Ruter led the release, with 443 contributors credited, 185 of them for the first time.
• Developer changes: 4.9 added CodeMirror to core for plugins and themes to use, upgraded MediaElement.js to 4.2.6 without its jQuery dependency, and introduced new capabilities for managing plugins and translations. Press This was removed from core and moved to a plugin.
• Release candidates: RC2 arrived on November 7 and an unscheduled RC3 on November 14 to catch issues missed earlier.
• WordPress 4.9.1: Released November 29 with four security fixes and 11 bug fixes, including the page template caching problem, a MediaElement error that blocked uploads in some languages, and file editing issues on Windows servers.
• Gutenberg 1.6 to 1.8: Version 1.6 moved the block toolbar to the top of the editor, 1.7 added multi-block transforms and dropped the iframe approach to meta boxes, and 1.8 added more extensibility for plugin developers. The team also prepared usability testing at WordCamp US.

Other WordPress News

• WordCamp Europe 2018: Early bird tickets went on sale and speaker applications opened for June’s event in Belgrade.
• Speaker diversity: A new diversity outreach speaker training initiative called for volunteers to help local communities train more varied speakers.
• Micro-regional WordCamps: After community discussion, a new type of micro-regional WordCamp was added to the program.
• Tide: XWP announced Tide, a service to audit and score plugins and themes on code quality, due to be presented at WordCamp US.
• Distributor: 10up released a beta of Distributor, a plugin for syndicating and reusing content across WordPress sites.
• African WordCamps: Harare and Nairobi held successful second WordCamps, and Bianca Welds received the Kim Parsell travel scholarship.
• Jetpack 5.5: Jetpack removed its own syntax highlighting and gallery widget to avoid conflicts with the new features in 4.9.
• WooCommerce and blocks: The WooCommerce team began exploring what e-commerce might look like in the Gutenberg era.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• WordPress 4.9.1: The four security fixes replaced a predictable newbloguser key with a properly generated hash, escaped language attributes on html elements and enclosure attributes in feeds, and stopped users without the unfiltered_html capability from uploading JavaScript files. Rahul Pratap Singh and John Blackbourn were credited.
• WP-SpamShield removed: The WP-SpamShield anti-spam plugin was removed from WordPress.org, and its author said he would pull all of his plugins from the directory.
• GDPR tools: Privacy-focused plugins began to appear, such as Delete Me for handling right-to-be-forgotten requests, while the GDPR for WordPress project gained support from developers.
• GitHub security alerts: GitHub launched vulnerability alerts for JavaScript and Ruby dependencies, a tool increasingly relevant as WordPress projects added npm packages.

Industry Trends and Insights

• Customization as a workflow: 4.9 treated site design as something to draft, review and schedule, much like content. It suggested where WordPress was heading as Gutenberg’s ideas moved beyond the post editor.
• Page builders under pressure: Tailor’s closure, partly blamed on Gutenberg, showed how the coming editor was already reshaping business decisions in the page builder market.
• Subscriptions: Envato Elements’ move to include WordPress themes and plugins in an all-you-can-download plan raised questions about how theme authors would be paid.
• Consultants: Commentators highlighted independent consultants as the people who actually set up and maintain much of WordPress for real businesses.

Theme of the Month: OceanWP

OceanWP, a free multipurpose theme with deep WooCommerce and page builder support, had grown quickly in 2017. With 4.9 making it easier to browse and preview themes in the Customizer, versatile free themes like OceanWP were well placed to win new users.

Plugin of the Month: Distributor

10up’s Distributor entered beta at the end of November as a way to push and pull content between WordPress sites, on multisite networks or across separate installs. For media companies and large organizations, it addressed a long-standing gap in the platform.

Host of the Month: Pantheon

Pantheon’s platform, with development, test and live environments for every site, matched the more careful workflows 4.9 encouraged, such as drafting and scheduling design changes rather than editing live. It remained a popular choice for agencies building on both WordPress and Drupal.

Founder of the Month: Topher DeRosia

Topher DeRosia, the founder of HeroPress, talked about community and his work on WP Weekly in November. HeroPress had become a home for personal essays from WordPress people around the world, many from outside North America and Europe, at a time when the project was working hard on diversity and inclusion.

Looking Ahead to December 2017

WordCamp US was set for December 1–3 in Nashville, with Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word on the Saturday afternoon and a free livestream for everyone else. Results from the 2017 survey and an update on Gutenberg’s timeline were expected.

Tide was due to launch at WordCamp US, and the community was waiting to hear whether Gutenberg would land in an early 2018 release.