Lester Chan’s WordPress Plugins

Ryan has announced the availability of WordPress 2.6 Beta 1. The final release of WordPress 2.6 should happen between 7th July 2008 to 14th July 2008 according to WordPress Trac’s Roadmap.

WordPress 2.6 is not a big release compared to WordPress 2.5, but hopefully it will not break any plugins as I just updated my plugins for WordPress 2.5.

I still think that WordPress should slow down their pace of development if not it will be hard for plugin authors to keep up with it as everytime a major version of WordPress comes out, plugins always breaks.

Here are the features of WordPress 2.6:

• Post Revisioning
• A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
• Caching of static files with Gears for faster Admin page loads
• A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
• XML-RPC API for changing blog options
• Better SSL support for the Admin
• Hierarchy-aware paging in the Manage Pages and Manage Categories admin pages.
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Customizable default avatars
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• Check box range selection with shift-click
• TinyMCE 3.1.0.1 with lots of bug fixes
• jQuery 1.2.6 with some nice performance improvements
• jQuery UI 1.5
• Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements

Finally the feature of activating/deactivating plugins in bulk is here!

WordPress 2.5.1 has been released. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix.

If you are interested in only the security fixes, just replaced the following files.

1. /wp-includes/pluggable.php
2. /wp-admin/includes/media.php
3. /wp-admin/media.php

There are more than 70 bugs and performance fixes in 2.5.1, here is an outline of it:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

WordPress 2.5 has been released and WordPress.org has a refreshed look based on WordPress 2.5 new redesigned administration backend.

New User Features in WordPress 2.5

• Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
• Dashboard Widgets
• Multi-file upload with progress bar
• Bonus: EXIF extraction
• Search posts and pages
• Tag management
• Password strength meter
• Concurrent editing protection
• Few-click plugin upgrades
• Friendlier visual post editor
• Built-in galleries

New Developer Features in WordPress 2.5

• Salted passwords
• Secure cookies
• Easy taxonomy and URL creation
• Inline documentation
• Database optimization
• $wpdb->prepare()
• Media buttons
• Shortcode API

Download: WordPress 2.5

I have upgraded this site to WordPress 2.5.

WordPress 2.5 RC 2 has been released alongside with a short screencast covering the new dashboard and uploader and Release Candidate 2.

I will be holding on to the upgrade to RC2 as the gold version will be out before end of this week.

Download: WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 2

The time I have been waiting for to test my plugins on WP 2.5 is finally here.

Some features in WordPress 2.5 taken from WordPress.org:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times.

Do take a look at WordPress.org’s blog - Sneak Peak on WordPress 2.5.

Download: WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 1

*UPDATE* Just updated this site to WordPress 2.5 RC1, apparently all my plugins seems to be working fine. Just that some alignment and colour scheme maybe a little off. I will try to fix it latest during my summer holidays.

Accordingly to Lorelle, WordPress 2.5 will be released before WordCamp Dallas.
As taken from WordCamp Dallas website:

The Dallas 2008 WordCamp spans two days, with the first day focusing primarily on general user topics and the second day primarily on developer topics, with some overlap.

In this case, WordPress 2.5 should be out on either 28th March 2008 or 29th March 2008.

WordPress 2.5 has been delayed till 17th March 2008 tentatively. I find the development cycle for WordPress 2.5 is a little weird.

For WordPress 2.3 and other previous versions of WordPress, betas and RCs are released first. For example, WP 2.3: Beta 1, WP 2.3: Beta 2, WP 2.3: Beta 3 and lastly WP 2.3: RC 1 are released first before WP 2.3 went gold.

For WordPress 2.5, there are so such releases (I am not talking about SVN nightly) and apparently the upcoming WP 2.5 will be the first and gold release.

Personally, I think they should release the betas and RCs officially first before releasing the gold version to the public.

But I still hope it get further delayed till my summer holidays so I can release it together with my plugins as I am too busy with school that I could not even take any time off to do my plugins.

As we are getting nearer and nearer towards WordPress 2.5 release date on 10th March 2008, at the same time, my school work is also piling up.

I am looking forward to the redesigned administration backend. All my plugins should work just fine for WordPress 2.5. The only change at the moment that I need to make is to my WP-Sticky to make use of the add_meta_box() instead of the DBX box.

Here are some links related to WordPress 2.5:

• Codex: WordPress 2.5
• Trac: WordPress 2.5
• WordPress 2.5 Demo Site
• WordPress 2.5 Plugin Settings Pages Style Guide
• Codex: Migrating Plugins and Themes

WordPress 2.3.3 has been released and this release includes a security fix (xmlrpc.php) and 3 minor bug fixes.
3 bug fixes as follows (Ctrl C + Ctrl V from WordPress Trac):

• gettext fails to determine byteorder on 64bit systems with php5.2.1
• some registration emails fail in 2.3.1 b/c of “callout verification”
• maybe_create_table call to config.php issue

5 files changed (Thanks to whooami):

• /wp-admin/install-helper.php
• /wp-includes/gettext.php
• /wp-includes/pluggable.php
• /wp-includes/version.php
• /xmlrpc.php

Get WordPress 2.3.3 now.

If you like my WordPress plugins, perhaps you can become a fan on my Lester Chan’s WordPress Plugins Page in Facebook.

Thanks =D