Dougal, Mitch, and Donna
As mentioned previously, I gave a presentation last weekend at WordCamp Birmingham 2008 on “The Future of WordPress”. My section on “The Past of WordPress” ran a little longer than I had planned, but a lot of people told me that they liked that overview, so I guess it was alright. [...]
If you have been thinking about attending WordCamp Birmingham 2008, but haven’t committed yet, now is the time. There are only a couple of hours left to sign up. Registration is only $25, and that includes lunch and a tee shirt — talk about a bargain! Register now!
Once again, we have arrived on Talk Like a Pirate Day. I had been hoping that I would be able to find time to upgrade my Text Filter Suite plugin for WordPress (which includes my Pirate filter for posts and comments), but I’ve just been too busy. [...]
As most of you have probably already seen in your Dashboard, yesterday afternoon saw the official WordPress 2.6.2 Release. And as mentioned in the comments on my intitial news break on the 2.6.2 Beta, the focus is on two security patches to cover weaknesses in PHP’s random number generation (which affects password encryption strength), and in MySQL’s field length checking. [...]
If you haven’t already heard, WordCamp Birmingham is coming up on September 27 & 28, 2008. And for those of you not in the States, that’s Birmingham, Alabama, not England. [...]
It looks like there’s going to be another point-release of WordPress coming soon. WordPress version 2.6.2-beta1 was just branded in svn a short while ago. . [...]
This is another one of those articles that will be of interest to a minority of WordPress users. In particular, if you use the XCache PHP opcode cache and Neosmart’s XCache object-cache plugin for WordPress. For those of you who don’t know what the heck I’m babbling about, a PHP opcode cache is a bit of software which helps your web server do less work when turning all your PHP code into web pages that a browser can render. [...]
I’m surprised that I haven’t seen mention of this from other channels yet (official or unofficial), but two days ago, SVN revision 8561 of the WordPress 2.6 branch was labled as WordPress version 2.6.1-beta1. The log messages reveal that most changes since the 2.6 release are minor bug and typo fixes. . [...]
The release of WordPress 2.6 is now official. In addition to the features I highlighted previously, Ryan has details on his blog about the improved support for SSL, and some new helper functions which will be useful for plugin and theme authors. And the official dev blog post has details on other new features. One of the more interesting things that I didn’t yet know about was that the Press This bookmarklet has some nifty autodetection which will make it easy to automatically embed content from sites like YouTube and Flickr.
In addition to the new features, I’d also like to point out that there has been a recent effort to improve the inline source documentation (using PHPdoc). [...]
I mentioned previously that the XML-RPC and Atom blog APIs would be disabled by default when WordPress 2.6 is released. This was a matter of some debate within the community, and there has been some clarification:
