Looking back at 2020
It’s been a crazy year for all of us. Events, time lines and just about everything in 2020 seems to have been hazy.
We thought it would be nice to sit back and take a look at all of the good stuff that happened in the WordPress community this year (yes, there’s plenty of it!).
January (Gutenberg, BobWP to DooTheWoo)
- 2020 kicked off with a Gutenberg release with blocks that allowed users to add a group of buttons, set the image size for a gallery, add links to the images in the media and text block and change the font size in the navigation block.
- Bob from BoBWP decided to dive in and focus only on WooCommerce, rebranding the podcast and the website as ‘Do the Woo’.
February (All-in-One-SEO, WordCamp Asia)
- All in One SEO was acquired by Awesome Motive, led by Syed Balkhi. It is the team that handles OptinMonster, WP Beginner, WP Forms, MonsterInsights, and a bunch of other WordPress tools as part of its portfolio.
- As Covid-19 spread around the world and large gatherings didn’t seem advisable, WordCamp Asia was canceled. I am sure it wasn’t an easy decision for the volunteers to make, after putting in so much of their personal time and effort in organizing it. But in the end, there wasn’t much choice.
- In a wonderful show of solidarity, WordFence pitched in to help WordCamp Asia participants who had incurred travel/accommodation expenses. That’s why we love this awesome community! Never ceases to amaze me!
March (Woo 4.0, Adderley)
- Automattic launched WooCommerce 4.0 with a new admin interface, updated onboarding experience, and additional updates.
- WordPress 5.4 “Adderley” introduced two new blocks- Social icons and Buttons. New option to add new gradients in Buttons and Cover block, toolbar access to color options in Rich Text blocks, and for the first time, color options in the Group and Columns blocks.
April (Astra 800K, Gutenberg 8.0)
- Brainstorm Force celebrated a milestone. Their popular WordPress theme WP Astra reaches 800k installations.
- Gutenberg 8.0 launched. Some nice user-facing improvements were made to the upgrade, including a combined block and pattern inserter, new options for inline formatting, and visual changes to the code editor.
May:
- Imagely acquired by Nathan Singh, who also acquired Soliloquy and Envira Gallery from Syed Balkhi’s Awesome Motive.
June:
- WordCamp Europe 2020 went live for the first time in history.
- Automattic invested $4.6 million in New Vector, a company founded by Matrix’s developers, an open standard for decentralized communications that powers end-to-end encryption.
- Awesome Motive acquired Smash Balloon, the most popular social feed plugins for WordPress with 13,00,000+ active installations.
July:
- The UK based Lain Poulson and Ashley Rich launched community-curated, news-sharing site WP Content.
- After eleven years, WordPress permitted end-users to upgrade an installed plugin or theme by uploading a ZIP file.
- Due to the pandemic and burden on the huge crew of volunteers at the gathering, WordCamp US 2020 was canceled.
August:
- WordPress announced that all proposals for flagship events in 2021 would no longer be approved.
- Plugin Rank launched- this WordPress plugin will let WordPress product owners track their rankings at WordPress.org.
- The Themes Team suspended the Astra theme from the WordPress official directory for breaking the directory’s ban on affiliate links.
- MotoPress acquired Gutenix WordPress theme that has more than 700 active installations after nine months on WordPress.org.
September:
- Gutenberg 8.9 launched- added Block-based widgets, new widgets screen, and more.
- A new ‘Delisting’ status for non-compliant themes was introduced to the WordPress Themes directory.
October:
- We launched our own Gutenberg addon plugin to help our users to build and design WordPress websites using Gutenberg.
- iThemes acquired WPComplete–Â an easy-to-use, interactive course completion plugin for WordPress.
- PushEngage joined Awesome motive.
November:
- We introduced our Elementor Addon plugin for our Responsive Pro users. Using this plugin our Pro users will no longer need an Elementor Pro license to get access to Elementor premium widgets.
- Envato announced that their global creative community has reached and surpassed US$1 billion in total earnings since Envato was founded in 2006!
- WordPress powered almost every contest in the US 2020 Elections.
December:
- WordPress.org launched a new learning forum- Learn WordPress. Learn WordPress is a digital resource that provides workshops, quizzes, classes, lesson plans, and chat groups, so that everyone can learn to do something about WordPress, from beginners to experienced users.
- Automattic acquired Mailpoet. This plugin is used by more than 300,000 websites for everything from building a mailing list to managing transactions and abandoned cart emails.
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