I was the guest tonight on the WordPress Community Podcast, hosted by Joost de Valk and Frederick Townes. We talked about upcoming features in WordPress 3.0, my past work as a WordPress core developer, my WordPress plugins, microformats, and a smattering of other topics. [...]
Earlier today, I finished up a WordPress plugin that I’ve been working on for a client. Without divulging too many details, I’ll say that it wasn’t a huge project, nor was it overly complicated, but it was interesting. . [...]
One of the big changes coming in WordPress 3.0 is the merge of the WordPress MU code into the standard stand-alone WordPress codebase. When WordPress 3.0 is released, you will be able to choose to install it either as a single site, or in multi-site mode. With the migration from WordPress MU (MultiUser) to WordPress 3.0 (Multisite), I think there is a need for us to clarify some terminology. [...]
I mentioned before that the jQuery project was going to switch from Mediawiki to using WordPress for their online documentation. They’ve recently pulled the trigger on that change, and you can now visit the new WordPress-powered site at: api.jquery.com
Performance and Backend
As mentioned before, we’ve switched away from using a MediaWiki backend to a new WordPress-powered backend. [...]
I have finally gotten around to adding proper pages on this site to provide information about my WordPress plugins. It’s still a work-in-progress, but it’s at least at a point that they are useful. When I get a chance, I’ll document the methods I used to automate things. But basically, I’ve created a couple of page templates, and I’m using the Plugin Info plugin to automagically bring in plugin metadata from the wordpress.org plugin repository.
The main Plugins page lists each plugin, with the plugin name and version, number of downloads so far, and an excerpt of the plugin description. [...]
As I begin writing this, Jane Wells is delivering her keynote at WordCamp Atlanta, speaking about the upcoming changes in WordPress 3.0. On the one hand, WordPress releases are ’serial’, so an 3.0 release doesn’t necessarily have any bigger changes than when we move from 2.8 to 2.9. [...]
I’m pleased to announce that I will be speaking at WordCamp Atlanta next month. I will be presenting an updated version of the Jumping Into WordPress Plugin Programming talk that I gave at WordCamp Birmingham in September. I think I can squeeze some more details in, and hopefully give some more detailed examples.
If you saw the original presentation (or just the slideshow), and you think there’s something else I need to cover, please feel free to let me know. [...]
Twice now, the jQuery Podcast has mentioned that the jQuery project is going to migrate its online documentation from Mediawiki to WordPress. Which is pretty cool, because, I happen to like WordPress (duh). [...]
If you visited my site in the last 9 hours and found it displaying nothing but an error message, my apologies. It’s part of the danger of running my site out of the WordPress SVN trunk (i.e., beta code), and taking advantage of new features.
My site automatically pulls in the latest code changes from SVN at midnight. And it seems that sometime yesterday, all of the post_image_* functions were renamed to post_thumbnail_*, and I failed to wrap one of my function calls with function_exists() protection. [...]
Bug Chasing
Okay, so in my post about Code Spelunking I mentioned about how working on a project can lead you to explore the code because you need to become more familiar with how the code works. But it can also lead you to explore the code to figure out why code doesn’t work. In this particular case, I spent many hours puzzling over why something didn’t work correctly, chasing down the root cause, and eventually finding a bug in the WordPress core. [...]