WordPress News Roundup October 2010: Yoast Launches WordPress SEO as Post Formats Land for 3.1

October 2010 was a heads-down month for WordPress 3.1. Post formats landed in the development code, the admin bar and internal linking took shape, and the core team pushed to clear hundreds of tickets so it could reach its feature freeze. There was no new WordPress release and no post on the WordPress.org news blog.

Outside core, the month’s biggest launch came from the Netherlands: on October 11 Joost de Valk released the public beta of WordPress SEO, a single plugin that would become one of the most widely installed in WordPress history. Late in the month, a Firefox extension called Firesheep showed how easily logins could be hijacked on open Wi-Fi.

WordPress Core Updates

WordPress 3.0.1 remained current while 3.1 development intensified on the core team’s blog.

• Feature status: A mid-October status report from Ryan Boren confirmed that post formats had landed, with discussion under way about how themes would expose them. Internal linking, the admin bar, Ajax-powered admin screens, a TinyMCE update, multi-taxonomy queries, custom post type archive pages, admin CSS cleanup and the separate network admin were in progress or partly committed.
• Activation hooks change: Andrew Nacin and scribu explained that in 3.1 plugin activation hooks would no longer fire during automatic updates, and that plugin authors should instead run upgrade routines based on a stored version number.
• Ticket triage: Late in the month Nacin reported clearing about 150 tickets from the Awaiting Review queue, with around 450 still waiting, as the team aimed to work through roughly 50 a night before beta.
• Schedule pressure: The October 28 developer chat agenda acknowledged that the team needed to reach freeze, as the original mid-October date slipped.
• WordPress.org tools: Plugin pages gained version-usage pie charts and a new stats API, and the Codex began recognising WordPress.org single sign-on.
• Google Code-in: On October 29 WordPress submitted its application to take part in Google Code-in, a contest for pre-university students.

Other WordPress News

• WordPress SEO public beta: On October 11 Joost de Valk announced the public beta of WordPress SEO, which combined the functions of his many smaller plugins into one. It would later be renamed Yoast SEO.
• WordCamp Detroit: Michigan’s first WordCamp took place in early October, organised by Anthony Montalbano, and WP Tavern published interviews and session recordings afterwards.
• Gravity Forms reviewed: WP Tavern’s detailed review of the GPL-licensed commercial form plugin praised its builder and licensing tiers.
• Easter eggs: A client who mistook a revision-comparison easter egg for a hack sparked a WP-Hackers debate on whether such jokes belonged in core.
• Starter kits: Max Foundry introduced the idea of WordPress “starter kits” bundling configuration for specific kinds of sites.
• Mobile updates: WordPress for iPhone 2.6.1 was in preparation to fix bugs introduced with the video features in 2.6.
• BuddyPress 1.2.6: BuddyPress developers were finishing version 1.2.6, with one blocker remaining in early October.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

October’s main security story was not a WordPress bug but a tool that exposed a weakness across the web.

• Firesheep: Unveiled by Eric Butler at the ToorCon conference in San Diego in late October, the Firefox extension let anyone on an open wireless network capture session cookies from sites that did not use encryption. WordPress was among the sites it supported out of the box, alongside Facebook and Twitter.
• Protecting logins: WP Tavern published advice on keeping WordPress logins safe from Firesheep. The most effective defence was to use SSL for logins and the dashboard, which WordPress already supported through its FORCE_SSL configuration constants.

Industry Trends and Insights

Firesheep was a turning point for HTTPS. By making session hijacking point-and-click, it pushed major sites toward encrypting entire sessions, and WordPress site owners began to treat SSL for the admin as best practice rather than an option for the paranoid.

• Freelance demand: A freelance marketplace report found WordPress projects far outnumbering Joomla work, a sign of where client demand was heading.
• SEO consolidates: WordPress SEO’s all-in-one approach challenged All in One SEO Pack and foreshadowed a decade in which SEO plugins became among the most installed software in the ecosystem.
• Tumblr-style content: Post formats in 3.1 reflected the influence of Tumblr and other tumblelog services on how people wanted to publish short, typed content.

Theme of the Month: P2

As post formats landed in 3.1’s development code, Automattic’s P2 was a reminder of where the appetite for quick, typed updates had already been met. Its front-page posting box and inline threaded replies made it a favourite for team status blogs, and it offered a preview of the lighter publishing styles that post formats aimed to bring to every theme.

Plugin of the Month: WordPress SEO

Released in public beta on October 11, WordPress SEO handled titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs and canonical settings in one plugin. Its arrival marked the start of what would become Yoast SEO, used on millions of sites.

Host of the Month: Linode

Developers responding to Firesheep needed hosting where they could install SSL certificates and configure HTTPS freely. Virtual private servers from providers such as Linode gave technical users that control at modest cost.

Founder of the Month: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk, who founded Yoast in 2010, launched WordPress SEO in October after years of building smaller SEO plugins and writing about search optimisation. The plugin became the foundation of one of the largest businesses in the WordPress ecosystem.

Looking Ahead to November 2010

November was expected to bring code freeze and the first beta of WordPress 3.1, under the plan that called for a beta period starting in mid-November. WordPress Weekly was also returning as a live show after a break.