So, if you are poking around and notice something a little wonky, please use the contact me link at the top of the page and let me know, or just leave a comment.

I tried the export/import feature, but the imported only imported about forty of my posts. It was pretty quick, but I did not want to do without the other 98% of my posts.

I ended up going into phpMyAdmin and doing a repair and optimize. I was looking around to see if there were some other utilities out there and found WP Optimize. I like the size of this utility, but ultimately thought there were better options out there.

I found WP DB Manager filled 90% of the reason I have to sign into phpMyAdmin. This plugin also includes some nice database backup functionality, including scheduling, that may replace WP DB Backup for me.

Lastly I tried Clean Options. This is a nice utility to help clean orphaned records from the options table, which in my case was the second largest table in the database. I quickly ran the utility and deleted 50+ old options. Once very nice feature of this plugin are the Google links to the option to help in determining whether the option is safe to be deleted. I am really indifferent with this plugin, especially since I could probably filter through the options just as fast manually as I could with the plugin, but it is nice to have GUI to work with.

In the end, it really does not matter what you use, just so long as you do it.

2.2.3 is a security and bug-fix release for the 2.2 series. Since this is a security release, we suggest you upgrade immediately. Two of the fixes are high priority.

As usual, you can download it here.

How many people out there that host their own WordPress actually do not want to upgrade? I cannot imagine there is a great number of people out there savvy enough to deal with the hosting (and all the tasks that come with the hosting) that do not want to upgrade for compatibility reasons.

On behalf of the WordPress.org community of commiters, contributers, and volunteers, I’m very proud to announce the immediate availability of WordPress 2.1 “Ella”, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. Here’s a sampling of what’s in the new version:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

…and much, much more. There are little easter eggs hidden everywhere, so the best way to find everything new is to just try it out.

Developer Features

Developers will especially love this release, as it has much cleaner code than 2.0 and includes hundreds of enhancements that will enable a new generation of richer plugins. Here’s a taste of some of the things included:

• Psuedo-cron functionality let’s you schedule events much like cron.
• Users admin can now comfortably handle hundreds of thousands of users.
• The new WP_Error class cleans up how we do error reporting and handling.
• The javascript loader makes it easier for plugins to include rich functionality.
• Tons of new hooks and APIs.
• We’ve started to fill out our code inline documentation.
• Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins.
• Custom header, color picker, and image cropping framework.

2.1 also includes over 550 bug fixes.

Because this is a much smaller update than previous versions, you do not have to update all of WordPress’ files if you’re upgrading from version 2.0.6. Here is the list of files that have changed since 2.0.6:

• wp-admin/inline-uploading.php
• wp-admin/post.php
• wp-includes/classes.php
• wp-includes/functions.php
• wp-settings.php
• wp-includes/version.php

We know it sucks to have a release only 10 days after our last one, but we think it’s important enough for your blog to be secure to do it, and hopefully only having to change a few files will make the upgrade easier than normal.

We have a pretty important release available for everyone, it includes an important security fix and it’s recommended that everyone upgrade. This is the latest release in our stable 2.0 line, which we’ve committed to maintaining for several more years.

Here’s what’s new:

• The aforementioned security fixes.
• HTML(link) quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
• Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
• Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

For developers, there’s a new anti-XSS function called attribute_escape(), and a new filter called “query” which allows you filter any SQL at runtime. (Which is pretty powerful.) Thanks to Mark Jaquith for handling this release and Stefan Esser for responsibly reporting the security issue.