WordPress News Roundup September 2012: WordPress 3.4.2 Release, WordPress 3.5 Beta 1 Debuts a New Media Manager as Twenty Twelve Arrives

September 2012 set up the final major release of the year. On September 27, WordPress 3.5 Beta 1 arrived with the start of a rebuilt media experience, the problem Matt Mullenweg had singled out at WordCamp San Francisco a few weeks earlier. The beta came with a bonus: the new Twenty Twelve default theme was published in the theme directory so anyone running WordPress 3.4.2 could try it straight away.

Earlier in the month, WordPress 3.4.2 fixed security issues and bugs in the 3.4 branch. The release post also noted that WordPress 3.4 had been downloaded nearly 15 million times in less than three months.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments

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

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 3.4.2 (September 6): The maintenance and security release fixed problems with older browsers in the admin, themes that did not preview correctly or show their screenshots, plugin compatibility with the visual editor, pagination with some category permalinks, oEmbed and trackback errors, and header images uploaded at the wrong size.
• WordPress 3.5 Beta 1 (September 27): The first beta introduced a reworked way to upload media, arrange galleries and insert images. The team said the media work was still rough in places.
• More in the beta: 3.5 Beta 1 also brought a simplified welcome screen, a new colour picker, a retina-ready dashboard, better keyboard and screen reader support, the ability to install favourite plugins from WordPress.org, XML-RPC switched on by default for mobile apps, and the Link Manager hidden on new installs.
• For developers: The beta added the Backbone and Underscore JavaScript libraries, updated TinyMCE, SimplePie, jQuery and jQuery UI, improved switch_to_blog() for multisite, allowed multisite in a subdirectory and removed AtomPub support.
• Twenty Twelve: The new default theme, fully responsive and designed to work well as a base for CMS sites, was released in the theme directory alongside the beta.

Other WordPress News

• Automattic in Forbes: A Forbes article on Automattic’s distributed workforce described a company of 120 employees in 26 countries. Mullenweg responded that remote work was a deliberate choice about how to build a company, not a way to save money.
• WordPress in politics: Mashable reported that WordPress was likely powering many candidates’ websites in the 2012 US election season.
• Company meetup: Automattic gathered in San Diego for a company-wide meetup.
• Testing the beta: The 3.5 announcement recommended the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, set to “bleeding edge nightlies,” as the easiest way to follow development.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• WordPress 3.4.2: The release fixed a potential privilege escalation and a bug affecting multisite installs with untrusted users, and added further security hardening. As a security release for all previous versions, it was recommended for every site.

Industry Trends and Insights

WordPress 3.5’s focus on media reflected how people were using the web in 2012. Photos taken on phones and shared on social networks had raised expectations for how easy it should be to upload and arrange images. WordPress’s old uploader felt dated by comparison, and the new media manager was meant to close that gap.

• Mobile-first design: Twenty Twelve’s responsive layout made mobile-friendly design the default for new WordPress sites.
• Modern JavaScript: Bundling Backbone and Underscore signalled a move towards richer, app-like interfaces in the WordPress admin.
• The CMS market: Joomla released version 3.0 on September 27, the same day as the WordPress 3.5 beta, with a new mobile-friendly admin built on Bootstrap.

Theme of the Month: Twenty Twelve

Twenty Twelve arrived in the theme directory on September 27, months before it would become the default in WordPress 3.5. Its clean, responsive design with a focus on typography made it a good fit for both blogs and simple business sites, and it worked with the current 3.4.2 release.

Plugin of the Month: WordPress Beta Tester

The WordPress Beta Tester plugin let users switch a test site to beta or nightly builds with one click. With 3.5 bringing major changes to media, the release team pointed testers to it so that plugin and theme authors could find problems before the final release.

Host of the Month: DreamHost

DreamHost, a long-time WordPress-friendly host, had worked through its difficult January and remained a popular home for bloggers and developers. Its one-click installs made it easy to spin up a separate test site for trying new WordPress betas safely.

Founder of the Month: Mike Little

Mike Little, the British developer who co-founded WordPress with Mullenweg in 2003, was the first person to respond when Mullenweg proposed forking b2. With the project nearing its tenth anniversary and redesigning core features such as media, his early role in getting WordPress started was worth remembering.

Looking Ahead to October 2012

More 3.5 betas were expected in October as the media manager was refined. The first WordPress Community Summit was scheduled for late October on Tybee Island, Georgia.