WordPress Turns 20, Annual Survey Results, Shortcode Issues in WP 🗞️ June 2023 WordPress News w/ CodeinWP

📆  This is the June 2023 edition of “This Month in WordPress with CodeinWP.” 

Howdy, WordPress fans. We are back with another dose of WordPress news and events from the past month.

In May, WordPress officially turned 20 years old! 🍾 To commemorate the anniversary, there were lots of in-person and online celebrations. Beyond that, we also got a look at the 2022 annual survey results, which helps give us a look at where WordPress might be headed in the future.

That’s not all, though. In other news, there was an issue with a core WordPress security release, the release of a new local development tool from Automattic, another big WordPress acquisition, and more.

Let’s get to all of the WordPress news from the past month…

In the biggest news from the past month, WordPress officially turned 20 years old on May 27.

Yes, it’s now been over two decades since Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg forked b2/cafelog to create WordPress. Here’s the original May 27, 2003 release post.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary, local WordPress chapters held meetups all across the world, which were listed on the WP20 page. People also used the #WP20 hashtag to share their WordPress stories on Twitter.

Does WordPress have another 20 years in it?

I don’t think anyone has the answer to that question. But given that WordPress is still powering over 43.6% of all websites on the web (or at least in W3Techs’ very large sample), I doubt that it’s going away any time soon.

Every year, the WordPress team gathers feedback from the community via an annual survey.

The survey collects responses from a range of users spanning all knowledge levels, geographic locations, and so on.

In early May, we finally got a look at the 2022 survey results.

The 2022 survey was shorter than previous years, only asking 29 questions whereas previous years asked almost 100 questions.

It also had far fewer respondents, with a 56% drop in survey submissions versus 2021. In 2022, there were 3,357 responses, while 2021 saw 7,710 (and 2020 had 17,295).

Here are some of the highlights:

• 22% of respondents have been using WordPress for less than a year, which shows that WordPress is still able to reach new users.
• There’s increased usage of blocks and the Site Editor, which makes sense given how much focus it’s received.
• The most popular reason to use WordPress is that it’s open-source, with 62% of respondents citing that as a reason.
• 62% of respondents also agreed that “WordPress is as good as or better than other CMS platforms.”
• The Net Promoter Score (NPS) numbers for WordPress were 41 and 38 (the survey included the question at both the beginning and the end, which is why there are two different numbers). In 2021, it was 45 and it was 42 in 2020.

If you want to dig deeper into the results, you can check out the full 2022 WordPress survey slide deck [PDF].

On May 16, we got the first minor WordPress release after WordPress 6.2 – WordPress 6.2.1.

It was a security and maintenance release that fixed five important security issues, so it was applied automatically to all sites with automatic updates enabled for minor releases.

Usually, minor security and maintenance releases won’t break functionality, which is why many people feel comfortable applying updates automatically.

Unfortunately, that was not the case with WordPress 6.2.1. It caused a major issue with breaking shortcode support in block templates. While this only affected newer block-enabled themes using the Site Editor, it still caused chaos on a lot of users’ sites.

This breaking functionality did not happen randomly, as one of the fixes in WordPress 6.2.1 was focused on fixing a potential vulnerability with shortcodes in user-generated content and Mika Epstein said that this change was by design.

To immediately fix the issue, a lot of users were forced to downgrade back to WordPress 6.2 Then, on May 20, WordPress 6.2.2 was released to fix the shortcode security vulnerability without breaking shortcode support in the templates of block-enabled themes.

While the issue is fixed, this fiasco will still have damaged the idea of automatic updates in a lot of people’s eyes. If even minor security fixes can include breaking functionality, users will rightly be wary of enabling automatic updates on their sites.

If you want to dig deeper, the comments section on this WP Tavern post has a lot of user feedback and responses.