Business Roundup Week Ending March 22

Surprising Trends in WordPress and Web Tech

The latest WordPress usage statistics show its continued dominance, powering 46% of all websites, while competitors like Drupal and Joomla have declined.
Nearly 20% of WordPress sites run outdated versions, with 5% still on the 4.x branch released in 2017 and 13% on the 5.x branch last updated in 2022.
Approximately 75% of WordPress sites use unsupported PHP versions, with 43% on end-of-life PHP 7.4.
WordPress competitors Squarespace and Wix continue to grow, and many WordPress users also utilize Hubspot Landing Page Builder for lead generation.
WooCommerce and Shopify are neck-and-neck for e-commerce dominance, with around 2.75 million sites each.
PHP usage has fallen considerably over the past 6 years but still powers around 35 million websites, presumably mostly WordPress.
Get more info (and snazzy charts and graphs) at the Tavern.

Claude AI 3.0 is Out , and it’s Pretty Great

Have you tried Claude.ai? If not, you should give it a shot.
Recently, Claude was update with 3 new state-of-the-art models with increasing levels of capability: Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus.
Opus outperforms peers on most common evaluation benchmarks, exhibiting near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks.
Haiku is the fastest and most cost-effective model, while Sonnet is more powerful and twice as fast as Claude 2.
The new Claude models show increased capabilities in analysis, forecasting, content creation, code generation, and non-English language conversation.
They also have sophisticated vision capabilities, processing photos, charts, graphs, and technical diagrams.
I’ve been using Claude for quite a while now and have found that it typically surpasses other AI models for content generation and digesting uploaded documents.
Read the full Claude 3.0 announcement and try Claude today.

BricksUltimate: Problems, Apologies and Transparency

A couple of weeks ago, social media conversations flared up among Bricks developers who discovered that the BricksUltimate plugin had a “backdoor” that could hide all posts on a site.
The obfuscated code contained a license check to guard against pirated licenses being sold on third party sites.
Developer uproar was fierce with many expressing outrage that a developer would secretly add a “malicious payload” to a plugin.
BricksUltimate developer, Chinmoy Kumar Paul, initially defended his actions on Facebook, explaining that the code simply guarded against known pirated licenses.
After some reflection, though, Chinmoy reversed his position, and issued an apology, taking responsibility for his decisions.
“This experience has been a humbling lesson, and I am deeply sorry for any harm or inconvenience that my actions have caused. I have learned a lot from this experience and strive to be a better member of the WordPress community in the future.”
He also added, “English is not my first language, and I acknowledge that my responses in various Facebook groups have not been as clear or articulate as they should have been. I failed to explain my intentions, leading to the worsening of the situation.”
Chinmoy has been part of the WordPress community for 10 years, and it’s hard not to empathize with him as he watched pirates stealing his hard work.
After all, his code only affected users whose plugin had been cracked with code designed to deliberately avoid proper licensing.
However, since the WordPress license clearly states that all themes and plugins must be released as open source, the definition of piracy gets a bit blurry. People can essentially do whatever they want with the code.
Chinmoy immediately released an update to BricksUltimate that removed the controversial code, and is committed supporting existing users.
Read the entire letter here.
What do you think about Chinmoy’s tactics? His response?
What can theme and plugin developers do to ward off piracy? Or, is piracy not even possible with open source code?