As announced on the dev blog, WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 is now available for download and testing. Some of the features of 2.3 include automatic notification for plugin and core code version updates, built-in tags support, faster javascript, and SEO-friendly URL redirection.
The new tag system includes an importer for those using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, and importers for a couple of other popular plugins are in the works. [...]
WordPress 2.2.1 is now available. Most of the changes are minor bug fixes, however there are some security fixes as well. We can’t stress enough how important it is to upgrade your sites and keep them current so that you aren’t open to attacks. Many people see these “minor” version updates and assume that they don’t need to install them. Mainly it seems to be folks who worry about an upgrade breaking their theme or their plugins. But if the themes and plugins are written properly, this won’t normally be a problem. [...]
If you run a busy WordPress site, or even if your site just has a lot of processor-intensive plugins, then you probably already run the WP-Cache plugin (plugin directory, original announcment, recent security update info). Even though my site isn’t super busy, my server is a little light in the RAM department, and using WP-Cache helps the box keep up with requests better.
One minor annoyance, however, is that with WP-Cache enabled, my syndication feeds aren’t delivered with the correct Content-Type. [...]
WordPress 2.2 “Getz” is now official. I’ve listed some of the changes previously, but here’s another quick rundown:
You can find a list of changes for version 2.2 on the WordPress Trac site. [...]
One of the new features in the upcoming WordPress 2.2 release is an option to “Deactivate All Plugins” with one click. Our standard advice is to deactivate all your plugins before upgrading so that out-of-date plugins won’t break your system mid-upgrade. But in the past, you had to deactivate plugins one at a time. Thus the new “Deactivate All Plugins” button to make this easier.
While testing some things on my development system, I was frustrated that after an upgrade, I still had to reactivate my plugins one by one. [...]
A while back, the WordPress development team decided to aim for date-targeted, quarterly releases, to speed up the development cycle. One of the main things this does is to give more frequent updates, but with fewer “big” new features in each release. The target for WordPress 2.2 was set for around April 23.
One of the new features in WordPress 2.2 is ‘tags’. For any of you who still don’t know what tags are, they are basically keywords that you can put on posts. [...]
Okay, I think things are finally (more-or-less) back in shape around here. Sorry about the problems you might encountered here over the past few days. I finally upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1, but I encountered some problems along the way. The problems were really indirectly related to the upgrade, and turned out to be my own dumb fault.
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. [...]
Some blog spam cases you might want to watch for
I like to think that I’ve got some pretty decent spam prevention measure in place on my server. My mail server uses RBL/DNSBL services and sets maximum limits for certain protocol violations. All my blogs use Akismet for comment spam detection. I’ve got a large number of entries in my comment moderation and blacklist lists. And I hook it all together into my SpamValve plugin, which automatically adds firewall rules to block repeat offenders.
Still, though, occassionally I get bursts of traffic that either aren’t detected by these measures, or that are detected, but the process of handling the connection causes excessive load on the system. [...]