Lester Chan’s WordPress Plugins

WordPress 3.0 named “Thelonious” has been released.

WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard). Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.) Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation. As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click.

For a more comprehensive look at everything that has improved in 3.0 check out 3.0’s Codex page or the long list of issues in Trac.

Source: WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”
Download: WordPress 3.0

WordPress 2.9.2 has been released.

Thomas Mackenzie alerted us to a problem where logged in users can peek at trashed posts belonging to other authors. If you have untrusted users signed up on your blog and sensitive posts in the trash, you should upgrade to 2.9.2. As always, you can visit the Tools->Upgrade menu to upgrade.

Changelog: WordPress 2.9.2
Download: WordPress 2.9.2
Download: Modified files since WordPress 2.9.1

WordPress 2.9.1 has been released.

This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts.

Changelog: WordPress 2.9.1
Download: WordPress 2.9.1
Download: Modified files since WordPress 2.9

WordPress 2.9 has been release.

Here are some of the highlights:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).
5. We now have rel=canonical support for better SEO.
6. There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);.
7. Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
8. A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.
9. Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
10. You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
11. We’ve upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
12. Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
13. Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
14. Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.
15. The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. We fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
16. Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
17. When you’re editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save. (Thank goodness!!!)
18. The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than ever; give it a try for on-the-fly blogging from wherever you are on the internet.
19. Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
20. Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query

Download: WordPress 2.9 (2.2MB)
Changelog: WordPress 2.9