When I was shopping for a hosting company, there were a few final contenders in consideration. But Slicehost hit a sweet-spot in the variables of price, host stats, and that certain je ne sais quoi that tells you that a company seems to Get It. “Built for Developers” — that’s a good start right there. You want Plesk or Webmin? They don’t give it to you. But you can install it yourself if you really want it. Yeah, baby — that’s my kind of hosting.

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First of all, in my post about Release Candidate 1, I mentioned that I had problems with the plugin updater. Since that time, I have been able to upgrade complex plugins with out a problem. I didn’t do extensive testing, but I feel like this is probably safer now. Other folks on the wp-testers mailing list have reported observed improvements similar to mine.

Next, I’ll point out that since the introduction of the WYSIWYG editor back in version 2.0, I have always stuck to the “Code” editor. And on top of that, I have disabled the auto-formatting (wptexturize and wpautop) filters. I’ve always entered every bit of HTML within my posts by hand. Starting with version 2.5, I’m going to relax my grip and hand the reigns back over to the system. I’ve disabled my “untexturize” plugin, and switched to the “Visual” editor as my default. The Visual editor should be just fine for most of the posts that I write. And on those occassions when I need to do something advanced (like <code>, <ins> or <del> tags, my standard “pull-quote” div for images, etc), I can seamlessly switch to the HTML view and back, without worrying about the Visual editor messing with my manual edits later.

And for those of you who might wonder, but haven’t seen it mentioned, the new improvements will be filtering into WordPress.com and the WordPress-MU codebase very soon.

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• Faster load times.
• Multi-file uploads.
• New “Media Manager” for images, audio, video, etc.
• Built-in gallery function.
• Built-in (and pluggable) Gravatars support.
• New backend design.
• One-click auto-update for plugins.
• Reactivate plugins after a ‘Deactivate All Plugins’ action. (my feature! )

As a long-time WordPress user and developer, the new design for the back-end admin screens threw me at first. I had the same questions that I saw many others post to the mailing lists. “Why did they clump these links together, and move these other ones to a different spot on the page?” But the more I’ve used it, it became obvious that the new menu layout made sense. The most frequently used items are prominent. The less-often needed ones are moved out of the way, but still easily accessible. I’m still not totally thrilled with the color choices (some elements don’t have enough contrast, to my eyes), but it turns out the the admin screen colors are pluggable, as well.

One of the more exciting features (IMO) is the one-click plugin updater. When you see a notification that a new version of a plugin is available, you’ll also see an ‘upgrade automatically’ link. If your server supports all the functions needed, clicking the link will download and install the new version for you. I will note that on my server, this feature does not always work flawlessly, and I’ve sometimes had to quickly download and install a plugin manually to fix a broken plugin. I’ve shared my observations on this, and I hope that they’ll be able to make this feature more robust before final release. My advice is to use this feature with caution for now. But I’m hoping that my problems with it are due to my server, and that I’ll have better luck when I get things moved to my new host.

Overall, I’m liking the new release. I haven’t had a chance to play with the media management and gallery features yet, but I’m looking forward to giving them a try. I think the new admin arrangement will be easier for new users, and I think most established users will come to appreciate it, too (and for those looking for something even more different, there’s the Fluency Admin theme).

As always, when toying with pre-release code, don’t forget to back up your database and files before you upgrade! Give it a spin, kick the tires, and let us know what you think.

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I mainly mention this as warning that if my site appears to be down, email bounces, or any other strangeness occurs, it might be because I’m in the middle of moving things around. It will probably be another couple of days before I start shaking things up. While I’m moving thing around, I might try consolidating some of my stand-alone WordPress sites into a WordPress-MU setup. That would make upgrades and other site management tasks a bit easier, I think.

With a little luck, and a lot of attention to detail, you might never know that I’ve changed anything. Yeah, right! Watch this space for further announcements.

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For those of you who may be confused about why there are two versions being updated in parallel, here’s a quick rundown: for WordPress to be available as an official package for Debian Linux, we made a commitment to maintain the 2.0 branch through 2010. Also, the 2.0 series still supports older versions of MySQL, while the continued development for WordPress 2.1 and beyond requires (currently) MySQL 4.0 or higher.

Also, the very observant among you might have noticed that there was no version 2.0.8 release. We went straight from 2.0.7 to 2.0.9. What happened? Well, we were just about to release 2.0.8, it was even tagged in svn and the package was available for download, but the official announcement was delayed while some new servers were being installed. Then the last XSS hole was brought to our attention, so we had to go ahead and bump the version number again for the new changes. Now you’re prepared to win the bonus round when you play WordPress Trivia.

In related news, I’ve split the WordPress announcements on Freshmeat.net into two branches, to reflect the stable support for the 2.0 line and continued development for 2.1+. If you aren’t familiar with Freshmeat, it’s a service where software projects can announce their latest releases. If you sign up for an account, you can even get email notification of whichever projects you would like to subscribe to. If you would like to use Freshmeat to track WordPress releases, you can visit the project pages for WordPress 2.0 and WordPress 2.1.

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On Friday, I decided to use my lunch hour to perform the upgrade. I backed up my database and my wp-content directory, deleted all the old WP files (I traditionally haven’t bothered with that step, but I knew that several files were renamed/outdated, and I wanted to do some general housecleaning anyhow), installed the new ones, and upgraded the database schema via wp-admin/upgrade.php. Everything looked fine. I switched the theme over to Sandbox and activated the ‘Rockem Sockem’ skin that I had created previously. Then I began activating my sidebar widgets to get my sidebar set up the way I wanted. It was around this time that I started noticing problems…

I started seeing really slow page loads and blank pages, and most of the time when I tried to access an admin page, the browser would time out, or think that it needed to download the page instead of display it. The load on the server was higher than usual, so I figured it was spammers hammering my site at a bad time. Except that when I watched my logs, I really didn’t see much suspicious activity. I wrestled with this for a while, still thinking that high server load was causing the site to have problems. I figured that perhaps upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5 might gain some improvements, and spent a few hours compiling PHP 5.2.0 and recompiling all the associated extensions that I needed. Nope, that didn’t seem to help.

Then at some point, on a whim, I brought up my wife’s web site, which runs on the same server. And what do you know — it came up just fine. I could also login and navigate the admin pages without any problems. Sooooo, the problem was just in my site. Probably a malfunctioning plugin. I disabled all the plugins by renaming the plugin directory temporarily and reloading the page (WP will automatically disable any plugins that it can’t load up, in case you weren’t aware of that trick). Voila, the pages loaded fine. I began re-enabling plugins one-by-one, starting with the ones I was most sure were okay, gradually working down to the likely culprits. Until I finally found it. It was my Now Playing widget, which I had recently (and hastily) refactored. Arg! It was my own fault that I had been having so many problems!

I haven’t narrowed down the exact nature of the problem yet, so that widget remains off. I suspect that the root of the problem is in the old Amazon search library that I’ve been using. I had meant to write my own, updated, stripped-down functions for that, but hadn’t gotten around to it, yet. I suppose I’ll be doing that soon(ish).

So, with that said, welcome to the new improved geek ramblings, powered by WordPress 2.1!

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• Tabbed WYSIWYG/Code editing: You can now easily switch back and forth between the WYSIWIG (AKA: RTE, or “Rich Text Editor”) and the old-style editor with quicktags.
• Autosave: When editing posts, your changes are automatically saved every two minutes, as long as you’ve set a title.
• Spellcheck: The RTE now includes a spelling checker. I just tried it out, and it works pretty nicely! Click on a flagged word to see possible corrections.
• Blogroll categories have been completely redone in a way that integrates them with regular post categories.
• “Home” page: You can now use a WordPress Page (sometimes called “static pages”, though that’s a misnomer) as your front page, instead of the usual list of latest blog posts. This makes it easier to treat WordPress as a Content Management System and less like a system specifically for blogging, for sites where it makes more sense to arrange things like that.
• Import/Export: There is now a native WordPress Import/Export tool included. This will make it easy to migrate a site from one server to another, or even set up environments where you could have “test”, “staging”, and “production” servers. In fact, I think that’s a ripe idea for a new plugin…
• Comment Management Improvements: Mucho improvement to comment management. Comments are now a top-level menu item, rather than a sub-menu of “Manage”. Paging is improved, you can now easily flag comments as moderated or as spam. And make sure you also take advantage of the new Akismet 2.0 plugin, which has some great improvements of its own.
• Database Optimizations: An expert from MySQL helped optimize the database queries, which should help improve page building speed and reduce server load.
• And much, much, more… There are lots of little user interface improvements, optimizations, better error handling, extended features, and under-the-hood goodies for plugin and theme creators.

I’ve upgraded two of my blogs, plus Susan’s blog from WordPress 2.0.7 to version 2.1, and both upgrades went off without a hitch. I haven’t upgraded this site yet, because I’ve still got some old, ugly hacks that I’d like to update into proper plugins. I had also hoped to launch a redesign when I upgraded, but I haven’t made as much progress on that as I wanted to, so I’ll probably do the redesign after-the-fact.

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ViaList is software that helps your club, group, committee, or family stay organized and up-to-date. It lets you share any kind of list — things to do, contact information, agendas, ideas, whatever you need — as easily as sending an e-mail.

A program that helps you make and share lists may not sound like a big deal, but when you actually use the software and see how intuitive it is, you could very well end up adding it to your list of favorite tools. I often see new utilities come onto the scene for the Mac and think, “I wish there was something like that for Windows.” This is one of those rare programs that turns the tables, and could have Mac users wishing they had ViaList (there are plans to make a Mac client, eventually).

A lot of what I worked on was on the system administration side, configuring the server for email, setting up the bug tracker, creating a “single sign-on” system, etc. But I also worked on a very early proof-of-concept for the web-based list interface. Oh, and with me being a WordPress dev, the site ended up using WP for its blog.

Susan and I have used it to maintain lists of projects around the house, shopping lists, and planning tasks for web sites that we’ve worked on together. This kind of asynchronous planning is very convenient. Anyhow, if you have a need to keep various kinds of lists (to-do, dated events, priorities, shopping, etc.), and especially if you need to coordinate the lists with other people, you should take a look at ViaList.

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All in all we’ve closed 114 bugs in the 2.0.1 release, which you’re welcome to check out if you’re curious about every fix. To summarize:

• You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
• Caching has been fixed under certain PHP enviroments.
• Permalinks have been fixed for weird enviroments as well.
• XML-RPC uploading works.
• Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
• Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
• Imports now use much less memory.
• Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.

There are also fixes for trackbacks, hosts running PHP in safe_mode, a couple of new API hooks, and various other things.

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