WordPress 2.6 Release

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/trackback/

WordPress 2.6 has been released.

Here are some new features of WordPress 2.6:

  • Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
  • Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
  • Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging
  • Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
  • Word count
  • Image captions under your image
  • Bulk management of plugins
  • A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG
  • Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries
  • Plugin update notification bubble
  • Customizable default avatars
  • You can now upload media when in full-screen mode
  • Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default
  • Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security
  • You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues
  • Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts
  • Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
  • You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one
  • A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions
  • Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI

2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

» Download WordPress 2.6

PS: The current version of my plugins should work well with WordPress 2.6 except WP-DownloadManager. Nevertheless, I will release updates to all of them tomorrow.

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Beta Version Of My Plugins Updated To WordPress 2.6

Whenever WordPress releases a .1 update and it is during my school holidays (May to August) or (December to January). I am always able to get all my plugins compatible with it before it is actually released and have some buffer for testing.

I had spent the whole night yesterday making my plugins work wells with WordPress 2.6 and perhaps even WordPress 2.7 while maintaining the backward compatibility with WordPress 2.5.

All my 15 plugins are available at the Downloads Page under Beta Scripts. It used to be 16 plugins, but I stopped developing WP-Wap and hence it became 15.

Do help me test it out either on WordPress 2.5 or WordPress 2.6 Beta. They should work just fine for both versions.

This site is running all 15 of them and it is based on WordPress 2.5. If you found any of my plugins that are not working well on this site, do let me know as well. I will update this site to WordPress 2.6 when RC1 comes out.

If everything goes fine, I will release the updates 2 days after WordPress 2.6 is being released.

PS: My mom always nag at me to get a job especially during my 3 months (summer holidays) from May to August. But I told her by developing plugins, I can get donations as well. If you really like my plugins and appreciate my effort that I have put into it, do drop me a donation. My Paypal email is lesterchan AT gmail DOT com. Thank You =)

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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.

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My Plugins With WordPress 2.6 Beta

I have downloaded WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 and installed it. Not much difference from WordPress 2.5 in terms of the layout.

Now on the extreme top menu on the extreme right, there is a link called “Speed up!” which links to Google Gears.

In the Dashboard, right under “Right Now”, there is a comment break down added to it. Here is an example: “You have 1 post, 1 page, contained within 1 category and 0 tags. Current comment break down: 1 total, 1 approved, 0 spam and 0 awaiting moderation.”

When you write a page or post, underneath the “Save” and “Published” button, there is a word count indicator.

The display of themes under “Available Themes” has also changed a little.

Now back to serious business.

I am still deciding whether or not to maintain WordPress 2.5 compatibility for the next wave of updates for my plugins as WordPress 2.6 introduces a lot of constants like “WP_PLUGIN_URL”, “WP_PLUGIN_DIR”
“WP_CONTENT_DIR”, “WP_CONTENT_URL”, etc.

2 potential issues that would break my plugin in WordPress 2.6 and I will be unable to fix it unless I find another way to do the AJAX, “Allow wp-config.php to exist one level up from WordPress root directory
and “Allow wp-content directory to exist in a custom location (not relative to ABSPATH)“.

Argh! WordPress 2.5 has the shortest development cycle!

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