Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

Hot off the presses is the release of WordPress 1.5.1. There is a Changelog available on the Codex which gives some highlights, a full list of submitted bugfixes on the mosquito bug tracker, and even more pedantic changeset details in the repository.

Here are some of the main new features/fixes that matter to me:

• Database query optimizations
• Improved Conditional GET support (I lobbied a lot for this)
• Fixes for plugin menu hooks
• Admin UI improvements
• Extended ping support

One thing that’s neat about the extended ping support: For each server in your “Update Services” list, WordPress will first attempt an extended ping, and if that fails it will fall back to a standard ping (we aren’t the first to do this). In case you aren’t sure what the distinction is, a standard ping just sends your blog’s name and URL. The extended ping also sends your RSS feed URL and can support the idea of separate “home page” and “blog” addresses. And of course, we’ve updated Ping-O-Matic to support extended pings, as well.