geek ramblings :: Random musings of a Southern geek

WordPress 2.2 Released

5/15/2007 – 9:52 pm

WordPress 2.2 "Getz" is now official. I've listed some of the changes previously, but here's another quick rundown:

Atom feeds updated to Atom 1.0
Preliminary support for Atom Publishing Protocol
Widgets are now supported in core
Protection against activating broken plugins
"Deactivate All Plugins" button. Sadly, my "Reactivate All Plugins" patch didn't make it into this release. Hopefully you'll see it in WP 2.3.
Improvements to comment management
Code optimizations and speedups
Future WYSIWYG support for the Safari browser
Post Preview moved into a popup window, rather than an iframe on the Write page
WordPress-specific XML-RPC API
JQuery support

You can find a list of changes for version 2.2 on the WordPress Trac site. Ready to sample the new hotness? Start downloading!

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By Dougal | Posted in Releases, Software, WordPress | Comments (45)

WordPress 2.2 Release Candidate 2 Now Available

5/14/2007 – 10:31 am

There have been some more bugfixes applied, and there is now a second RC available. Details are in Ryan Boren's announcement.

WordPress 2.2 RC2 -- You're soaking in it! (In other words, I'm running it here )

By the way, one other change in this version that I don't think has been mentioned in the previous announcements: In the "Write Post" screen, the post preview is no longer displayed directly in the page. Instead, you'll find a "Preview" link near the title area which will pop up the post preview in a separate window. This speeds up page loads and reduces bandwidth consumption during post editing.

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By Dougal | Posted in Releases, Beta, Software, WordPress | Comments (6)

WordPress 2.2 Release Candidate 1 Now Available

5/9/2007 – 10:41 am

Last night, rob1n tagged WordPress 2.2 RC1 in the svn repository, and Ryan Boren posted an announcement on his blog. That means that at this point, there shouldn't be any major feature changes going into this branch, just bugfixes. It also means that it's almost ready for official release. If you know what you're doing, and you are willing to help test for and report bugs, download it from the Release Archives and give it a whirl!

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By Dougal | Posted in Releases, Beta, Software, WordPress | Comments (15)

Benefits of Blogging

4/27/2007 – 11:33 am

My brother-in-law, Bob, has been keeping a blog on wordpress.com for a while now called Arcane Code. He mostly writes about software development using Microsoft tools, because that's what he does for a living. He's also had some interesting posts lately about installing various flavors of Linux under Virtual PC, and a long series digging deeply into SQL Server. But one of his most recent posts caught my eye and I wanted to share it: Arcane Thoughts: Benefits of Blogging.

In this article, Bob briefly outlines six benefits that he gets from writing on his blog: Meet and Greet, Self Documenting, Self Promotion, Mentoring, Education, and Giving Back. Even though I don't make time to post something new every day (I wish I could), I have some of the same thoughts and feelings about why I keep a blog. Click on over, read his post, tell Bob why you blog. And tell him that Dougal sent you.

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By Dougal | Posted in Community, Blogging, Family, WordPress, Blogs, Personal | Comments (7)

Plugin Management

4/20/2007 – 1:30 pm

One of the new features in the upcoming WordPress 2.2 release is an option to "Deactivate All Plugins" with one click. Our standard advice is to deactivate all your plugins before upgrading so that out-of-date plugins won't break your system mid-upgrade. But in the past, you had to deactivate plugins one at a time. Thus the new "Deactivate All Plugins" button to make this easier.

While testing some things on my development system, I was frustrated that after an upgrade, I still had to reactivate my plugins one by one. So I threw together a "Reactivate All Plugins" feature, which I hope will be implemented for the release of WordPress 2.2.

With this patch, when you use "Deactivate All Plugins", your current active plugins list is saved. Then later, when you attempt to "Reactivate All Plugins", it will check each plugin one-by-one. The worst that could happen is if one of your old plugins throws a PHP fatal error, then the reactivation is aborted, and no plugins are reactivated. Simpler errors, like a plugin being deleted from disk between the deactivation and reactivation, are handled more gracefully -- the valid plugins will be reactivated, and the missing ones will be reported to you.

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By Dougal | Posted in Releases, Plugins, WordPress, Programming | Comments (32)

WP Tags: Perhaps I spoke too soon…

4/19/2007 – 2:49 pm

Doh. I should have caught up on my wp-hackers reading before I made that last post. It appears that we're going to delay the tags support until version 2.3 in order to have more time to flesh out all the details properly. Instead, it appears that sidebar widgets may become an official core addition in WP 2.2. Stay tuned for more details...

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By Dougal | Posted in Widgets, Releases, Tags, WordPress | Comments (13)

WordPress 2.2 Delayed

4/19/2007 – 1:03 pm

A while back, the WordPress development team decided to aim for date-targeted, quarterly releases, to speed up the development cycle. One of the main things this does is to give more frequent updates, but with fewer "big" new features in each release. The target for WordPress 2.2 was set for around April 23.

One of the new features in WordPress 2.2 is 'tags'. For any of you who still don't know what tags are, they are basically keywords that you can put on posts. It's similar to categories, but the idea is that tags are intended to be more generalized and free-form, and less formal than a category system. When tags appear on your posts or your RSS/Atom feeds, they are marked up in a way that they can be detected by search engines, allowing them to index your content in a more meaningful way, and even allowing you to cross reference data across multiple services which share the same tags. Some of the most popular applications that use tags are Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio.us.

Recently on the wp-hackers mailing list, there was a flurry of technical discussion about the underlying implementation of the WP tags system. I won't bore you with the details (see the mailing list archives if you're interested, it basically started with Knut-Olav Hoven's post and really took off with Robert Deaton's proposal, but there were several other related threads, including Matt's rationale for the first implementation and Ryan's proposal for a replacement), but the result of the conversation was that the tags system is getting a serious under-the-hood overhaul. The new system is going to be extremely flexible, and will even allow plugins to define their own taxonomies (which basically means that they could have their own private set of tags, separate from the main system or from other plugins).

But, since these changes have come about so close to the scheduled release date, the developers have decided to push the release back by "a week or two", according to Matt. I have a feeling that this will definitely be worth it in the long run. The improved tags API and underlying database schema are going to open a lot of interesting doors for plugin developers

This whole process has been a great example of the WordPress development community at work. The decision to implement tags came about because it's one of the most popular topics on WordPress Ideas, and the re-engineering and subsequent decision to spend more time on it came about because of discussions on one of the mailing lists. That's how an Open Source project is supposed to work, and it's great to see the process succeed.

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By Dougal | Posted in Releases, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Tags, WordPress | Comments (16)

Tax Time Tradition

4/17/2007 – 4:19 pm

Once again, I've upheld my time-honored tradition of getting my taxes in the mail at the last minute.

Just like every other year that I've promised myself that I'd get them mailed off weeks in advance...

Of course, it didn't help that we had some sort of stomach virus making the rounds in our family over the past several weeks. First Jamie was sick for about a week, then Claire got it the next week, then Susan had it after that. Fortunately, Mary never caught it, and I either got a weakened strain or my system just fought it better, because I only had a few days of mild symptoms.

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By Dougal | Posted in Traditions, Taxes, Personal | Comments (2)

Things I intentionally did not blog about recently

4/12/2007 – 1:58 pm

Here are some hot topics that I specifically chose not to blog about recently:

The "Blogger Code of Conduct"
Don Imus' racial slurs
Anna Nicole's baby-daddy

You're welcome.

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By Dougal | Posted in Blogging, Culture, Humor, News, Fun | Comments (10)

New WordPress Releases: 2.0.10 and 2.1.3

4/3/2007 – 11:44 pm

That's right, two shiny new bugfix/security updates. One for the 2.0 branch and one for the 2.1 branch. There are some small bugfixes in both of these versions, but the main reason to upgrade is for the security fixes (I'm going to write more on that subject later).

Visit the downloads page for version 2.1.3, and the Release Archive for version 2.0.10.

Watch later this month for the release of WordPress 2.2. This upcoming release will add several new features, including built-in support for tags(!), Atom 1.0 feeds for posts and comments, some preliminary Atom Publishing Protocol support (I've been working on that), several new XML-RPC methods, widget support in the default templates, performance enhancements, and several other things that I can't think of right now. Obviously, there will be more details available at the time of the official release, which is slated for April 22.

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By Dougal | Posted in Releases, Security, Software, WordPress | Comments (8)