WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has announced that the latest version of the WordPress platform, a 5.0 version, will be released early this month. He wrote on the WordPress developer blog, “We are now targeting Thursday, December 6th for public release and announcement. 5.0.1 will open for commits soon, and will be an area people can choose to focus on at the contributor day at WordCamp U.S. in Nashville this Sunday.” [1]
WordPress is the indisputable world leading Content Management System, owning a 60% market share for CMSs[2], along with powering 32% of all websites on the Internet.[3] So with an online presence looming this large, there would be millions of website owners who would be impacted by any updates to the software. Many website owners have already criticized Mullenweg for his choice of time in releasing these updates, for it being in the middle of the busy holiday season, as opposed to the original set date which was November 27[4].
Mullenweg has since responded to these critiques, saying in his blog that the release date decision was based on the stability, testing, and reports on the release candidates and that the target release date will be adjusted anytime that new issues happen to show the software being unstable. He also reassured his clients that they can update their websites at their own pace, writing, “You can push the button when you’re ready.” The WordPress development team has introduced the new Gutenberg editor within the dashboard which they will allow users to try with a download, but they will want to keep up with the security patches, themes, and plug-in functionality before they update.
Meanwhile, Joomla, another one of the world’s most popular content management systems, has announced the release of Joomla 3.9 last October.[5] Its new features include several powerful subsystems within a Privacy System that will help to ensure the compliance of Joomla websites, along with an Action Logging System that enables users to create an audit-log of website activity performed. Users will now also get to add notes to articles, filter them, search for a specific article content and load a module by ID into an article, for both monolingual and multilingual sites.
- ^ https://martechtoday.com/wordpress-to-release-5-0-gutenberg-this-week-228368
- ^ https://kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/
- ^ https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all
- ^ https://wordpress.org/news/2018/11/wordpress-5-0-release-candidate/
- ^ https://www.realwire.com/releases/Joomla-39s-Privacy-Tools-Drive-GDPR-and-Regulatory-Compliance