WordPress News Roundup

The WordPress Performance team held its first meeting in early November. The team worked on creating focus areas and working groups related to Images, JavaScript, Site Health and Measurement.

Automattic acquired WPScan, a WordPress security vulnerability database company founded in 2011. The plans are to make WPScan more open and integrate it further into Jetpack Scan. WPScan founders, Ryan Dewhurst and Erwan Le Rousseau, have joined Automattic as part of the Jetpack team. WPScan customers should not be affected in the short term by the acquisition.

In perhaps the biggest news of the year, Pagely announced that it was been acquired by GoDaddy. Pagely will focus on improving GoDaddy’s WooCommerce offerings. You can watch a one-hour detailed interview between Cory Miller, Josh Strebel, and Beka Rice on YouTube.

According to Sarah Gooding at WPTavern, Automattic did not have any knowledge of Google throttling non-AMP ads prior to establishing a partnership.

Marieke van de Rakt announced that she has stepped down as CEO at Yoast and has been replaced by Thijs de Valk. de Rakt is stepping back from the company to spend more time with her family. She plans to continue working at Yoast as a creative marketing manager.

Black Friday has come and gone but in the myriad of websites publishing deals, this landing page by Ben Townsend deserves a mention. Between the retro colors and the overall feel of the page, I think it is one of the best designed out there. Have a look and see for yourself.

WordPress 5.8.2 was released which fixed a security issue in addition to two bugs. Since it’s a security release, folks are reminded to double-check to make sure your sites are running the latest version.

Due to some blockers identified prior to the release of WordPress 5.9 Beta 1, the beta was delayed by 24 hours and then indefinitely. After some discussion with various teams, it was decided to push back the official release of WordPress 5.9 to January of 2022.

Matt Mullenweg will be delivering the State of the Word from Automattic’s satellite office in New York City, December 14, 2021, between 5 and 7 pm ET/10 – 12 am (December 15) UTC. He’ll be summarizing what’s happening in the WordPress ecosystem and he might even talk about subjects related to Web3 and Blockchain.

Liquid Web acquired Modern Tribe, a long-standing development agency. The agency will continue to exist as its own entity while keeping existing leadership intact.

GoDaddy discovered that on September 6, 2021, an attacker gained access to their systems using a compromised account. The attacker has access to customer email addresses, SFTP passwords, database passwords, and SSL private keys for at least two months. The attack was not limited to GoDaddy as customers hosted on Media Temple and other resellers were also affected.

WordPress News Roundup – December 2021

In this Article