WordPress News Roundup October 2012: The First WordPress Community Summit Meets as Hurricane Sandy Strikes

October 2012 ended with a first for the WordPress project. On October 29, around a hundred contributors and community members gathered on Tybee Island, Georgia, for the inaugural WordPress Community Summit, an invitation-only unconference meant to tackle the project’s challenges across teams. Hurricane Sandy, which hit the US East Coast at the same time, cancelled flights and kept some invitees from attending.

Development of WordPress 3.5 continued with a second beta, and Automattic shipped a significant Jetpack update that brought WordPress.com notifications and a new REST API to self-hosted sites.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

No WordPress-related acquisitions or funding rounds were announced in October 2012.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 3.5 Beta 2 (October 13): The second beta, released two weeks after the first, added a new gallery workflow with drag-and-drop reordering and quick caption editing.
• Image editing API: Beta 2 also introduced a new API for image editing, giving developers a cleaner way to work with images on the server.
• Static front page: The Reading Settings screen got a new interface for choosing a static front page.
• Media first: Beta 2 kept the focus on media, the area Mullenweg had singled out at WordCamp San Francisco in August as needing to become a first-class part of WordPress.
• Testing advice: As with Beta 1, the team advised testing on a separate site and recommended the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.

Other WordPress News

• Community Summit (October 29): The first WordPress Community Summit brought together representatives elected by the project’s contributor teams, including core, theme review, support, documentation, plugins, events and translation, along with business owners and plugin and theme authors. The format was an unscripted unconference, organisers had hoped to record some sessions for WordPress.tv, and many attendees met in person for the first time.
• Sandy’s impact: The storm that devastated parts of the Northeast cancelled flights and stopped some invitees from reaching Georgia. Those who did attend held discussions that would shape the project’s community work in the following years.
• Jetpack 1.9 (October 26): Mullenweg announced a new Jetpack with toolbar notifications, iOS push notifications, a new REST API and contact form fixes.
• Windows 8 launches: Microsoft released Windows 8 on October 26, the platform for which a WordPress.com app had been demonstrated earlier in the year.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

October brought no core security release or major plugin vulnerability. WordPress 3.4.2, released in September, remained the recommended version for live sites while 3.5 was in beta.

Industry Trends and Insights

The Community Summit reflected how large the WordPress project had become. With volunteer teams for support, themes, plugins, documentation, translation and events, many of the project’s problems could no longer be solved within a single team. The summit was a first attempt to bring all those groups into one room.

• APIs for everything: Jetpack’s new REST API was an early sign of a wider move towards exposing WordPress data through APIs, a move that would eventually lead to the REST API in core.
• Notifications across devices: Toolbar and mobile notifications showed Automattic linking WordPress.com and self-hosted sites into a single experience for comments and follows.
• Bitcoin on the radar: Early in the month Mullenweg shared an essay arguing that Bitcoin’s value lay in its decentralisation, a few weeks before WordPress.com began accepting the currency.
• Media in core: The new gallery workflow and image editing API showed 3.5 delivering on the media improvements promised at WordCamp San Francisco.

Theme of the Month: Mystique

Mystique, by digitalnature, was a well-known free theme with a polished design and plenty of built-in options. It was one of many free themes that showed how much design quality users could get without paying, at a time when the theme directory was growing quickly.

Plugin of the Month: Edit Flow

Edit Flow added editorial tools to WordPress, including custom post statuses, an editorial calendar, editorial comments and story budgets. As more newsrooms and multi-author sites used WordPress, it filled a real need for teams that had to plan and review content together.

Host of the Month: Pagely

Pagely, one of the original managed WordPress hosts, was preparing to host PressNomics, a new conference on the business of WordPress, in Chandler, Arizona, from November 8 to 10. Profits from the event were set to go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Founder of the Month: Joshua Strebel

Joshua Strebel, co-founder of Pagely with Sally Strebel, created PressNomics to bring together people running WordPress businesses. Planned for less than two weeks after the Community Summit, the conference showed how much the commercial side of WordPress had grown.

Looking Ahead to November 2012

November was set to bring PressNomics in Chandler, Arizona, from November 8 to 10, along with more 3.5 betas and possibly a first release candidate as the team worked towards a December release.