From the release notes, this is a minor security update with a few bug fixes, so there should be no plug-in or theme compatibility issues and no excuse not to upgrade.
How many people out there who host their own WordPress actually do not want to upgrade? I cannot imagine there are many savvy enough to deal with hosting (and all the tasks that come with it) who do not want to upgrade for compatibility reasons.
So I was still running the RC version of Windows Vista many, many months ago and I was getting frustrated. My wireless connection kept dropping, and repairing the connection would not work. Windows said that there were no wireless networks available, but the hardware diagnostics said that everything was functioning normally. I was frustrated and did something that I had always wanted to do … I right clicked on the C:\ and selected format. It was a great feeling. I threw the laptop in a cupboard and left it for several months.
I have been working way too much lately and decided that I needed to get my laptop in order instead of using my work laptop when I got home. (I used my work laptop for work, but I always seem to work more on that machine than on my own.) Knowing that my beta of Vista had expired, and not being all to thrilled with that OS anyways, I formatted and loaded ol’ XP Pro back onto my laptop. The laptop was dual boot with Ubuntu loaded onto the second partition, so I had to reinstall GRUB.
I hit the power button. Nothing.
I removed the power cord and battery for a couple of minutes and tried again. Surge-Pop.
I had just spent the last hour re-installing Windows and I hardly wanted to deal with this, so back in the cupboard it went, a project for another day.
Still wanting to stop using my work laptop at home, I mustered up all of my cuteness (not much, but I tried) and asked my wife if I could get another laptop.
She said, “No.”
I wasn’t surprised about her response. With the extra hours that I have been working we had the money, so I rationally explained my thought process and asked again.
I told her I would stop working so many hours.
She said, “Maybe.”
Yippee! I was getting somewhere! I asked what I could do to convince her to let me have my new toy. She said I had to get rid of all of my “project computers.” Ouch. I conceded that Franken-puter would have to wait. I quickly ran downstairs and savaged anything worth salvaging and packed it away and threw the rest out. Eight workstations in total.
I shopped around and found a decent deal on an HP and was off to the store.
I am glad to have “my” applications back. I am glad to sign in to non-work IM. I am glad to open Outlook and actually be happy to see a message in my Inbox. I am glad to sort and tag the six month backlog of photos. I am glad to update my financial software for the first time in almost six months. But mostly I am glad the I am using “my” computer and I can do whatever the hell heck I want on it.
I haven’t worked more than a ten hour day since I bought my new toy. I have played with the boys more in the last two days than I did all of last week.
Life is good.
I get bored easily. Or I get a little pissy when people jack my graphics and use them on the parked domain carpentology.com. I do not now, nor have I ever had intentions of purchasing that domain, but the least they could do is attribute it appropriately
But I digress.
I am partial to green themes. This time, I went without any images and got rid of the standard sidebar in favor of a small menu bar at the top of the page. I am sure some bugs still need to be sprayed, so if you see anything, please let me know.
So … do you like it?
Edit: I posted the image below since it is not included in the new template.
WordPress 2.1 has been released. This is a major release, and I am glad to have it finnaly running on my front end. I have been playing with some themes for “Ella,” and hopefully I will be able to get some site updates out this weekend.
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 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.
WordPress 2.0.7 has semi quietly been released. According to the release notes, this is a patch release.
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.
I spent a decent amount of time looking for a sitemap generator for Plogger. After a lengthy, fruitless search, I decided to take a stab at building my own. It checked out OK with Google, so I thought I would share it to see if anyone else had ideas.
This sitemap maps all collections, albums, and pictures. This version assumes that .htaccess is enabled for nice URLs, but it would be a quick rewrite to have it work without nice URLs. It would be a long rewrite to check if mod_rewrite was enabled, but that could be done, too.
With all of the housekeeping (and phone calls, emails, and instant messages i had with my hosting provider) I just now got around to upgrading to WordPress 2.0.6.
We have a pretty important release available for everyone, it includes an important security fix, and it is 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 security above fixes.
- HTML quick tags 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 to filter any SQL at runtime. (This is pretty powerful.) Thanks to Mark Jaquith for handling this release and Stefan Esser for responsibly reporting the security issue.
Go and get this, too!
I am writing this post from Window Live Writer. It seems to be all over the blogosphere this morning, so I thought I would try.
Installations were a breeze, but you cannot specify an installation directory, so those of us who install programs on separate drives are SOL.
Setting up the blog was even easier than the installation. All you need to do is type in the URL and Windows Live Writer does the rest.
There are three interfaces for composing: two WYSIWYG, one HTML preview with the styles from your blog, and the last one, which resembles a simple word processor. The third interface is the classic HTML view. WLW also has preview and spell-check functions, which PFF, my preferred tool, does not.
I will update this post once I have published it to let you know if everything came across alright (unlike my post from Office 2007 Beta).
UPDATE: The worst thing that WLW did during the post was not to separate my paragraphs. It’s not too shabby.
UPDATE 2: The image uploads are a little wonky. For WordPress, it loads to the correct directory (i.e., uploads/2006/08), but there, it creates a sub-folder based on the post title and another folder to contain the thumbnail and the original image. This in itself is not a huge deal, but it makes these uploads inaccessible through the web admin panel.