Canonical URLs

Mark has posted a very detailed post containing this Canonical URLs, a new feature in WordPress 2.3 and personally I like this feature a lot because some of my users are complaining to me that when they are using my WP-PageNavi, when they access http://example.com/page/1/ they do not get redirected to http://example.com, but I told them it is a WordPress issue over here and finally, this “bug” is gone for good.

So, what’s the problem with this? The URLs are all showing the exact same content, so why should it matter? Well, search engines can’t assume that all of these alternative URLs represent the same resource. So they don’t automatically get condensed into a single resource. As a result, you can actually end up competing against yourself in search engine rankings. So to avoid confuse search engines and to consolidate your rankings for your content, there should only be one URL for a resource. We call this URL the canonical URL. Canonical means “standard” or “authoritative”. It’s the one that WordPress generates, and it’s the one that you want everyone to use.

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WordPress 3.6 RC1

WordPress 3.6 RC1 is out! The final version of WordPress 3.6 will be out in a couple of weeks. I am guessing there will be 2 or more RCs till the final release.

The first release candidate for WordPress 3.6 is now available.

We hope to ship WordPress 3.6 in a couple weeks. But to do that, we really need your help! If you haven’t tested 3.6 yet, there’s no time like the present. (But please: not on a live production site, unless you’re feeling especially adventurous.)

Think you’ve found a bug? Please post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If any known issues come up, you’ll be able to find them here. Developers, please test your plugins and themes, so that if there is a compatibility issue, we can sort it out before the final release.

To test WordPress 3.6, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip).

As you may have heard, we backed the Post Format UI feature out of the release. On the other hand, our slick new revisions browser had some extra time to develop. You should see it with 200+ revisions loaded — scrubbing back and forth at lightning speed is a thing of beauty.

Delayed, but still loved
The release will be out soon
Test it, por favor

Download: WordPress 3.6 RC1

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WordPress 2.6.2

WordPress 2.6.2 has been released.

Stefan Esser recently warned developers of the dangers of SQL Column Truncation and the weakness of mt_rand(). With his help we worked around these problems and are now releasing WordPress 2.6.2. If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade. With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password. Stefan Esser will release details of the complete attack shortly. The attack is difficult to accomplish, but its mere possibility means we recommend upgrading to 2.6.2.

Here is a list of bugs fixed:

  • Can’t control where a user redirects to when they log in
  • Bug in textpattern import
  • include mysql version in version check query string
  • RSS widget shouldn’t link if there isn’t a link
  • get_post_meta fails to unserialize when $single=false
  • typing error in wp-settings.php
  • comment_max_links causes confusion when zero
  • get_posts not working properly
  • Insert image into post always inserts full size
  • Filter news on templates cant work
  • Typo in post revisions

Here is a list of changed files:

  • wp-login.php
  • wp-settings.php
  • /wp-includes/formatting.php
  • /wp-includes/pluggable.php
  • /wp-includes/post.php
  • /wp-includes/query.php
  • /wp-includes/version.php
  • /wp-includes/widgets.php
  • /wp-admin/css/press-this-ie.css
  • /wp-admin/import/textpattern.php
  • /wp-admin/includes/image.php
  • /wp-admin/includes/template.php

Download WordPress 2.6.2

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