WordPress now powers over 1/3rd of the top 10 million sites on the web according to W3Techs. Our market share has been growing steadily over the last few years, going from 29.9% just one year ago to 33.4% now. We are, of course, quite proud of these numbers!
The path here has been very exciting. In 2005, we were celebrating 50,000 downloads. Six years later, in January 2011, WordPress was powering 13.1% of websites. And now, early in 2019, we are powering 33.4% of sites. Our latest release has already been downloaded close to 14 million times, and it was only released on the 21st of February.
WordPress market share on the rise over the last 8 years. Image source: W3Techs.
Over the years WordPress has become the CMS of choice for more and more people and companies. As various businesses use WordPress, the variety of WordPress sites grows. Large enterprise businesses all the way down to small local businesses: all of them use WordPress to power their site. We love seeing that and we strive to continuously make WordPress better for all of you.
We’d like to thank everyone who works on WordPress, which is built and maintained by a huge community of volunteers that has grown alongside the CMS. This incredible community makes it possible for WordPress to keep growing while still also remaining free. And of course, we’d like to thank all of you using WordPress for using it and trusting in it. To all of you: let’s celebrate!
WordPress 5.1.1 is now available! This security and maintenance release introduces 14 fixes and enhancements, including changes designed to help hosts prepare users for the minimum PHP version bump coming in 5.2.
This release also includes a pair of security fixes that handle how comments are filtered and then stored in the database. With a maliciously crafted comment, a WordPress post was vulnerable to cross-site scripting.
WordPress versions 5.1 and earlier are affected by these bugs, which are fixed in version 5.1.1. Updated versions of WordPress 5.0 and earlier are also available for any users who have not yet updated to 5.1.
Props to Simon Scannell of RIPS Technologies who discovered this flaw independent of some work that was being done by members of the core security team. Thank you to all of the reporters for privately disclosing the vulnerabilities, which gave us time to fix them before WordPress sites could be attacked.
Other highlights of this release include:
Hosts can now offer a button for their users to update PHP.
The recommended PHP version used by the “Update PHP” notice can now be filtered.
WordPress 5.1.1 was a short-cycle maintenance release. Version 5.1.2 is expected to follow a similar two week release cadence.
You can download WordPress 5.1.1 or visit Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now. Sites that support automatic background updates have already started to update automatically.
In addition to the security researcher mentioned above, thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 5.1.1:
A new version of WordPress, significant security enhancements, important discussions, and much more – read on to find out what has been going on in the WordPress community for the month of February.
Release of WordPress 5.1
Near the end of the month, WordPress 5.1 was released, featuring significant stability and performance enhancements as well as the first of the Site Health mechanisms that are in active development. Most prominent is the new warning for sites running long-outdated versions of PHP.
You can check out the Field Guide for this release for a detailed look at all the new features and improvements. The next release is already in development with plans to improve the Site Health features, PHP compatibility, and a number of other things.
The block editor that is now a part of WordPress core started out as a project named Gutenberg with the lofty goal of creating a whole new site-building experience for all WordPress users. The first phase of Gutenberg resulted in the block editor that was included in WordPress 5.0, but development didn’t stop there – phase 2 of the project is well underway.
This month, one of the initial goals for this phase was reached with all of the core WordPress widgets being converted to blocks – this will go a long way to allowing full sites to be built using blocks, rather than simply post or page content.
Both the iOS and Android apps are open for beta testers, so if you would like to experience the block editor on mobile today, then join the beta program.
One of the goals for 2019 that Matt Mullenweg (@matt) announced in his State of the Word address last year was to form a team who would work to manage the ever-increasing number of tickets in Trac, the bug tracker that WordPress Core employs.
This team, known as the Triage Team, has been announced. Their work will involve coordinating with component maintainers, release leads, project leadership, contributors, and other WordPress related projects with issue trackers outside of Trac to ensure that everyone is empowered to focus on contributing.
The team was formed based on nominations of volunteers to take part and will be led by Jonathan Desrosiers (@desrosj). The other members of the team are Chris Christoff (@chriscct7), Tammie Lister (@karmatosed), Sergey Biryukov (@sergey), and Sheri Bigelow (@designsimply) – all of whom have a strong track record of contributing to WordPress, have exhibited good triaging practices, and are overall good community members.
Further Reading:
In this year alone, the WordPress meetup program has hosted 800 events across the world, all organized by local community members.
Version 5.1 of WordPress, named “Betty” in honour of acclaimed jazz vocalist Betty Carter, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard.
Following WordPress 5.0 — a major release which introduced the new block editor — 5.1 focuses on polish, in particular by improving the overall performance of the editor. In addition, this release paves the way for a better, faster, and more secure WordPress with some essential tools for site administrators and developers.
Site Health
With security and speed in mind, this release introduces WordPress’s first Site Health features. WordPress will start showing notices to administrators of sites that run long-outdated versions of PHP, which is the programming language that powers WordPress.
When you install new plugins, WordPress’s Site Health features will check them against the version of PHP you’re running. If the plugin requires a version that won’t work with your site, WordPress will keep you from installing that plugin.
Editor Performance
Introduced in WordPress 5.0, the new block editor continues to improve. Most significantly, WordPress 5.1 includes solid performance improvements within the editor. The editor should feel a little quicker to start, and typing should feel smoother.
Expect more performance improvements in the next couple of releases.
5.1 introduces a new database table to store metadata associated with sites and allows for the storage of arbitrary site data relevant in a multisite / network context.
The Cron API has been updated with new functions to assist with returning data and includes new filters for modifying cron storage. Other changes in behavior affect cron spawning on servers running FastCGI and PHP-FPM versions 7.0.16 and above.
New test config file constant in the test suite, new plugin action hooks
Short-circuit filters for wp_unique_post_slug(), WP_User_Query, and count_users()
A new human_readable_duration function
Improved taxonomy metabox sanitization
Limited LIKE support for meta keys when using WP_Meta_Query
A new “doing it wrong” notice when registering REST API endpoints
…and more!
The Squad
This release was led by Matt Mullenweg, along with Gary Pendergast as Senior Code Reshuffler and Poet. They received wonderful assistance from the following 561 contributors for this release, 231 of whom were making their first ever contribution! Pull up some Betty Carter on your music service of choice, and check out some of their profiles:
Finally, thanks to all the community translators who worked on WordPress 5.1. Their efforts bring WordPress 5.1 fully translated to 34 languages at release time, with more on the way.
This release includes the final About page design. It also contains fixes for:
New WordPress installs not setting the database table prefix correctly (#46220).
A HTTP error occurring when opening browser developer tools (#46218).
The legacy media dialog having incorrect pagination link styling (#41858).
The comment form not appearing when clicking “Reply” on comments loaded via Ajax (#46260).
Plugin and Theme Developers
Please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 5.1 and update the Tested up to version in the readme to 5.1. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post to the support forums so we can figure those out before the final release.
The WordPress 5.1 Field Guide has also been published, which goes into the details of the major changes.
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.
WordPress Five Point One: It’s so slick, shiny, and new. Lands in a few days!
The first release candidate for WordPress 5.1 is now available!
This is an important milestone, as the release date for WordPress 5.1 draws near. “Release Candidate” means that the new version is ready for release, but with millions of users and thousands of plugins and themes, it’s possible something was missed. WordPress 5.1 is scheduled to be released on Thursday, February 21, but we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.1 yet, now is the time!
Inspired by Archie Bell & The Drells, WordPress’s theme for 2019 is to “tighten up”, and WordPress 5.1 focussed on exactly that.
With security and speed in mind, this release introduces WordPress’s first Site Health features. WordPress will start showing notices to administrators of sites that run long-outdated versions of PHP, which is the programming language that powers WordPress.
Furthermore, when installing new plugins, WordPress’s Site Health features will check whether a plugin requires a version of PHP incompatible with your site. If so, WordPress will prevent you from installing that plugin.
The new block editor has kept improving since its introduction in WordPress 5.0. Most significantly, WordPress 5.1 includes solid performance improvements within the editor. The editor should feel a little quicker to start, and typing should feel smoother. There are more features and performance improvements planned in upcoming WordPress releases, you can check them out in the Gutenberg plugin.
Plugin and Theme Developers
Please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 5.1 and update the Tested up to version in the readme to 5.1. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post to the support forums so we can figure those out before the final release.
The WordPress 5.1 Field Guide has also been published, which goes into the details of the major changes.
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.
This is my release candidate. There are many like it. This is mine.
The momentum from December’s WordPress 5.0 release was maintained through January with some big announcements and significant updates. Read on to find out what happened in the WordPress project last month.
WordPress Leadership Grows
In a milestone announcement this month, WordPress project lead, Matt Mullenweg (@matt), named two individuals who are coming on board to expand the leadership team of the project.
Both Josepha and Joost have contributed to the WordPress project for many years and will certainly have a much larger impact going forward in their new roles.
This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.
There are two ways to test the WordPress 5.1 beta: try the WordPress Beta Testerplugin (you’ll want to select the “bleeding edge nightlies” option), or you can download the beta here (zip).
WordPress 5.1 is slated for release on February 21, and we need your help to get there!
Site Health Check
One of the features originally slated for WordPress 5.1—the PHP error protection handler—will target WordPress 5.2 instead. Some potential security issues were discovered in the implementation: rather than risk releasing insecure code, the team decided to pull it out of WordPress 5.1. The work in #46130 is showing good progress towards addressing the security concerns, if you’d like to follow development progress on this feature.
Additional Changes
A handful of smaller bugs have also been fixed in this release, including:
TinyMCE has been upgraded to version 4.9.2 (#46094).
The block editor has had a couple of bugs fixed (#46137).
A few differences in behaviour between the classic block and the classic editor have been fixed (#46062, #46071, #46085).
When adding rel attributes to links, ensure the value isn’t empty (#45352), and that it works as expected with customizer changesets (#45292).
Developer Notes
WordPress 5.1 has many changes aimed at polishing the developer experience. To keep you informed, we publish developers’ notes on the Make WordPress Core blog throughout the release cycle. Subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog for updates over the coming weeks, detailing other changes in 5.1 that you should be aware of.
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.
In just a few weeks WordPress Five-One will be here. Your testing helps us!
This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.
There are two ways to test the WordPress 5.1 beta: try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want to select the “bleeding edge nightlies” option), or you can download the beta here (zip).
WordPress 5.1 is slated for release on February 21, and we need your help to get there!
Over 110 tickets have been closed since beta 1, many of which are documentation and testing suite improvements. Here are the major changes and bug fixes:
The pre_render_block and render_block_data filters have been introduced allowing plugins to override block attribute values (#45451, dev note coming soon).
get_template_part() will now return a value indicating whether a template file was found and loaded (#40969).
A notice will now be triggered when developers incorrectly register REST API endpoints (related dev note).
Bulk editing posts will no longer unintentionally change a post’s post format (#44914)
Twemoji has been updated to the latest version, 11.2.0 (#45133).
A bug preventing the Custom Fields meta box from being enabled has been fixed (#46028).
The treatment of orderby values for post__in, post_parent__in, and post_name__in has been standardized (#38034).
When updating language packs, old language packs are now correctly deleted to avoid filling up disk space (#45468).
Developer Notes
WordPress 5.1 has many changes aimed at polishing the developer experience. To keep you informed, we publish developers notes on the Make WordPress Core blog throughout the release cycle. Subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog for updates over the coming weeks, detailing other changes in 5.1 that you should be aware of.
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.
Do you enjoy bugs? I don’t. So, we fixed them all. Well, not all. But close.
This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.
There are two ways to test the WordPress 5.1 beta: try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want to select the “bleeding edge nightlies” option), or you can download the beta here (zip).
WordPress 5.1 is slated for release on February 21, and we need your help to get there. Here are some of the big items to test so we can find as many bugs as possible in the coming weeks.
Site Health Check
Site Health Check is an ongoing project aimed at improving the stability and performance of the entire WordPress ecosystem. The first phase of this project is included in WordPress 5.1. For the first time, WordPress will catch and pause the problem code, so you can log in to your Dashboard and see what the problem is (#44458). Before, you’d have to FTP in to your files or get in touch with your host.
Added LIKE support to meta_key comparisons in WP_Meta_Query (#42409).
There have been over 360 tickets closed in WordPress 5.1, with numerous small bug fixes and improvements to help smooth your WordPress experience.
Keep your eyes on the Make WordPress Core blog for more developer notes (which are assigned the dev-notes tag) in the coming weeks detailing other changes in 5.1 that you should be aware of.
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.
Miss my haiku? I will have plenty for you in the coming weeks.
