WordPress 3.7.1

WordPress 3.7.1 has been released and it is a maintenance release. Are you using the new background autoupdate feature yet?

This .1 release fixes 12 bugs including:

  • Images with captions no longer appear broken in the visual editor.
  • Allow some sites running on old or poorly configured servers to continue to check for updates from WordPress.org.
  • Avoid fatal errors with certain plugins that were incorrectly calling some WordPress functions too early.
  • Fix hierarchical sorting in get_pages(), exclusions in wp_list_categories(), and in_category() when called with empty values.
  • Fix a warning that may occur in certain setups while performing a search, and a few other notices.

For me, my WordPress installation is a git checkout, so the background autoupdate is not applicable for me. I normally just do:

git fetch –tags; git checkout 3.7.1

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (66 votes, average: 3.79 out of 5)

My Plugins With WordPress 2.6 Part 2

My good friend Ozh has written an article entitled, What Plugin Coders Must Know About WordPress 2.6. It is a good read if you are a plugin developer for WordPress.

Both of us have came to a conclusion that if you move your /wp-content/ folder to elsewhere, you may need to manually specify the path to wp-config.php in the respective plugins that make use of them as there is no 100% way of guessing the path to wp-config.php.

So my recommendation is DO NOT MOVE the /wp-content/ folder. It is OK to move wp-config.php to a level higher, but try not to touch /wp-content/.

With regards to my plugins, I will release a .01 update bringing the version to 1.31 and 2.31 for the respective plugins. This update will make sure that the plugin will work for BOTH WordPress 2.5 and WordPress 2.6. That is right, I will maintain backward compatibility with WordPress 2.5 for the next update as WordPress 2.6 is just a minor release.

When WordPress 2.7 comes out in November 2008, I will bump all the versions to 1.40 and 2.40 respectively and I will remove the backward compatibility feature to WordPress 2.5.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (38 votes, average: 3.79 out of 5)

WordPress 3.2

WordPress 3.2 has been released and over at the US, it is 4th July aka Independence Day!

Here in the U.S. we are observing Independence Day, and I can’t think of a more fitting way to mark a day that celebrates freedom than by releasing more free software to help democratize publishing around the globe. I’m excited to announce that WordPress 3.2 is now available to the world, both as an update in your dashboard and a download on WordPress.org. Version 3.2 is our fifteenth major release of WordPress and comes just four months after 3.1 (which coincidentally just passed the 15 million download mark this morning), reflecting the growing speed of development in the WordPress community and our dedication to getting improvements in your hands as soon as possible. We’re dedicating this release to noted composer and pianist George Gershwin.

The focus for this release was making WordPress faster and lighter. The first thing you’ll notice when you log in to 3.2 is a refreshed dashboard design that tightens the typography, design, and code behind the admin. (Rhapsody in Grey?) If you’re starting a new blog, you’ll also appreciate the fully HTML5 new Twenty Eleven theme, fulfilling our plan to replace the default theme every year. Start writing your first post in our redesigned post editor and venture to the full-screen button in the editing toolbar to enter the new distraction-free writing or zen mode, my personal favorite feature of the release. All of the widgets, menus, buttons, and interface elements fade away to allow you to compose and edit your thoughts in a completely clean environment conducive to writing, but when your mouse strays to the top of the screen your most-used shortcuts are right there where you need them. (I like to press F11 to take my browser full-screen, getting rid of even the OS chrome.)

Under the hood there have been a number of improvements, not the least of which is the streamlining enabled by our previously announced plan of retiring support for PHP4, older versions of MySQL, and legacy browsers like IE6, which allows us to take advantage of more features enabled by new technologies. The admin bar has a few more shortcuts to your most commonly-used actions. On the comment moderation screen, the new approve & reply feature speeds up your conversation management. You’ll notice in your first update after 3.2 that we’ll only be updating the files that have changed with each new release instead of every file in your WordPress installation, which makes updates significantly faster on all hosting platforms. There are also some fun new theme features shown off by Twenty Eleven, like the ability to have multiple rotating header images to highlight all of your favorite photos

Download: WordPress 3.2
Codex: WordPress 3.2
Trac: WordPress 3.2

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (222 votes, average: 3.78 out of 5)

WordPress 2.6.1

WordPress 2.6.1 has been released and it is a very minor release. Not security flaws has been found and hence WordPress 2.6.1 is not a security fix so if you are comfortable with WordPress 2.6 like me, you don’t have to upgrade.

2.6.1 offers several improvements for international users. Styling of the admin for right-to-left languages is much improved thanks to the efforts of the Farsi and Hebrew translation teams, and a mysterious gettext bug caused by certain PHP configurations is now fixed. For IIS users, 2.6.1 fixes several permalink problems. Image insertion problems in the Press This feature experienced by IE users are also fixed. Of note to everyone is a fix for a performance bug in the admin where those with a lot of plugins would experience slowness on some pages.

I am so looking forward to WordPress 2.7 as lots of features which are available as plugin will be built into the core.

Download WordPress 2.6.1

*UPDATE* I decided to upgrade to stopped the nagging upgrading message to appear.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (205 votes, average: 3.78 out of 5)