The WordPress project recently released WordPress 4.9, “Tipton” — a new major release named in honor of musician and band leader Billy Tipton.

While this month we focused on building new features for WordPress core, we advanced other areas of the project too. Read on to learn more about what the WordPress project accomplished during the month of October.

A bug discovered in WordPress allows attackers to trigger an SQL injection attack leading to complete website hijacking. The vulnerability was discovered in the WordPress content management system (CMS) versions 4.8.2 and below. On Tuesday, WordPress announced the launch of version 4.8.3 as a security release which mitigates the security flaw.

How can a system fundamentally evolve without drastically changing? WordPress can build incredible sites, yet the usability and clarity that used to be a driving force for its adoption has been fading away. The present reality is that many people struggle using WordPress as a tool for expression—they struggle to compose richer posts with media, to get their site looking the way they want, to imitate how a theme demo looks, or to set up and customize a store. There is a disconnect between what is edited in a given field somewhere in the interface with how it will look on the real site. WordPress has always been about the user experience...

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.9, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”).

This has been an interesting month for WordPress, as a bold move on the JavaScript front brought the WordPress project to the forefront of many discussions across the development world.

I heard snippets of talk about Gutenberg on WordPress all summer long, but since I was traveling I didn’t have time to really investigate it. Recently, I ran into a fellow WordPresser and she told me that WordPress 5.0 is going to “revolutionize” WordPress. How exactly that would happen, she couldn’t say, but later I began to wonder if it had something to do with the Gutenberg I’d been hearing about.

WordPress 4.8.2 is available for download and users are encouraged to update as soon as possible. This release patches eight security vulnerabilities and has six maintenance related fixes.

YouTube is full of videos ready to be consumed by WordPress addicts. Here is a list of ten YouTube channels for WordPress users curated by us.

Can't decide between YouTube or Vimeo for WordPress videos? Check our comparison of YouTube vs Vimeo to see which one is better for WordPress videos.

While there haven’t been any major events or big new developments in the WordPress world this past month, a lot of work has gone into developing a sustainable future for the project.

Movable type was about books, but it wasn’t just about books. Ideas spread. Literacy spiked. The elite monopoly on education and government started to crack. Luther’s 95 Theses were printed on a press, rocking Europe, and he issued “broadsheets.” Broadsheets became newspapers; newspapers enabled democracy. The printing press ushered in social, political, and economic sea changes. Gutenberg changed everything.

If you want to know how your site is doing, you need Google Analytics. Use this guide to add it to WordPress in five minutes or less.

Selling goods and services on WordPress.com just got a lot easier. Yesterday, Automattic announced the launch of a Simple Payment button that allows users of the hosted blog/site/CMS service to accept Paypal payments in just a few clicks. The feature is currently available to users on the paid Premium and Business accounts.

Recently, the Wordfence team has seen ransomware being used in attacks targeting WordPress. We are currently tracking a ransomware variant we are calling “EV ransomware.” The following post describes what this ransomware does and how to protect yourself from being hit by this attack.

WordPress core contributors have set a tentative schedule for the upcoming 4.9 release, which will be co-led by Mel Choyce and Weston Ruter. The development cycle kicked off in early August with Beta 1 scheduled for early October and the official release targeted for November 14.

The Awl, ThinkProgress, Film School Rejects, and several other publishers have moved back to WordPress after short experiments on Medium.

Get access to email and social media tools, ecommerce, custom themes, and more.

After a particularly busy month in June, things settled down a bit in the WordPress world — WordPress 4.8’s release went very smoothly, allowing the Core team to build up some of the community infrastructure around development. Read on for more interesting news from around the WordPress world in July.

WordPress’ iOS and Android apps will soon be getting a new editor. The appearance of the new editor, codenamed “Aztec,” is very similar to the old one but is light years ahead of its predecessor in both speed and reliability. Aaron Douglas, iOS engineer at Automattic, announced the open beta for Aztec today with a side-by-side comparison video of the old and new editors. A copy and paste test with 500 paragraphs on iPhone 6s demonstrates Aztec’s instantaneous response while the old editor takes two-minutes to render the text.