Basically, the contest is to create a plugin, widget, mash up, hack, or other variety of web application that helps people find and share opportunities to take action. The grand prize is 50 benjis, and the best WordPress plugin will also be featured in the Plugin Directory. But the real prize is spreading a little more love in the world.
“Writing a Plugin” in the WordPress Codex is where I got started when I needed to get hooked in to WordPress. Others might like to grab one of the over 4,000 open source WordPress plugins and tweak the source. If in need of a little help, the Plugins and Hacks forum is full of friends to assist you wrap your head around the code or debug a problem. Social Actions also has provided some developer resources.
Let’s show them how we change the web the WordPress way!
One of the biggest problems and most frequent complaints we’ve had with the WordPress.org Plugins Directory is the horrible, horrible search results.
No longer. We’re now using Sphinx (a “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”) to power search on the Plugins Directory both from the website and from within your blog’s admin (Plugins → Add New).
It works much better. There are a few oddities floating around (our fault not sphinx’s) that we’ll be cleaning up shortly, but we’re happy enough with it on the whole to start letting everyone else use it
Currently, the search only indexes the plugin’s title and description/installation/FAQ/etc. (from the plugin’s readme.txt file), but we’ll be adding things like authors and tags soon.
2.7.1, the first 2.7 maintenance release, is now available. 2.7.1 fixes 68 tickets. You can automatically upgrade from 2.7 to 2.7.1 via the Tools → Upgrade menu, or you can download the package and upgrade manually.
You may have noticed that we went much longer than usual to release this .1 update. We’re very proud of this fact because it’s a testament to the testing all of you contributed prior to the release of 2.7 which helped make it the most bug-free release we’ve had.
Finally partly due to the stability of the 2.7 we’ve decided to push back 2.8 a few more weeks so we can bring in a few more speed optimizations, taxonomy enhancements, and new theme features. We also need to figure out which jazz musician to name the release after.
WordPress by itself is very simple — what makes it compelling for most of its users is the wide array of plugins (and themes) available for WP. The average WordPress blog has about 5 plugins installed! Today we just passed 4,000 plugins available in our plugin directory. (Which is also embedded into everyone’s WordPress 2.7 or above.)
I declare January 28th our official “Thank a Plugin Developer” day. To celebrate take a look at the plugins you use and love, visit the author’s site, find their contact form, and drop them a note thanking them. (Or Paypal!) Look for the links in the plugin directory to “author homepage” and also to donate directly if they’ve specified a Paypal address.
Thank you to everyone who has ever written a plugin for WordPress, and here’s to the next four thousand.
Posted January 17, 2009 by Matt. Filed under WordCamp.
Today we’ve switched on WordPress.tv, your visual resource for all things WordPress.
On WordPress.tv, you’ll find tutorials for both WordPress self-installs and WordPress.com to help you get blogging fast and hassle-free. We’ve kicked things off with the basics — now you can shape what comes next. Just drop us a line and let us know what you’d like to see added.
WordPress.tv is also now the place to find all that awesome WordCamp footage that was floating around the web without a home. See the presentations you missed and get a peek at behind-the-scenes action. We call it WordCampTV.
You’ll also find slideshows of presentations made by WordPress gurus, plus interviews I’ve done with the media and fellow bloggers.
I hope you’ll consider WordPress.tv not just a support resource, but also a place to hang out and keep up with all the geeky goodness going on in the WordPress community. Tune in regularly for fresh content and updates to the WordPress.tv blog. Lots more is on the way.
Everyone knows by now that WordPress 2.7 is packed with new features. Now that it’s available (almost 600,000 downloads as I write this!), it’s time to start working on 2.8. There were dozens of things that got tabled during 2.7 due to time constraints, and there are a lot of high-rated features in the Ideas forum, so there are a lot of potential features under consideration.
Right now, the lead developers are thinking the top priorities for 2.8 will be widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades. The rest of the development time will be taken up with bug tickets and additional features/enhancements from a prioritized list. To that end, we’ve posted a new survey for you to help us prioritize features for 2.8. The list pulls from the developers’ “2.7 leftovers” list as well as the most popular features from the Ideas forum. Just rank each feature and tell us your top pick (up to three). You also have the option of adding comments or additional suggestions, but this is not mandatory. For your response to count, you must rank all of the features in the list. The survey has only one page.
Note that media features are not included in this list as we will be posting a separate survey for media-specific features soon.
Cast your votes any time this week, but as always the sooner the better. This survey will close at noon on December 31, 2008 UTC.
In the new year, we will be reviving scheduled IRC developer chats, where the lead developers will discuss the week’s progress on feature development, providing opportunities for people to ask questions or make suggestions. These will be held early in the day on Wednesdays (U.S. Wednesday), and the specific time will be posted here on the development blog once it’s been finalized.
As a related aside, we spent a significant amount of time during 2.7 development sifting through Trac tickets that really shouldn’t have been there. Feature ideas and requests do not belong in Trac, they belong in the Ideas forum. Please reserve Trac for reporting bugs and things that need fixing (typos, code enhancements, etc.). If you are asking for a new UI, a new feature, or a new approach to coding something, that’s not an enhancement, it’s a new feature. New features will be entered into Trac by developers once it has been determined that the feature should be included in core. To help speed up development, moving forward we will close Trac tickets that are actually feature requests, with the comment that they should be posted in the Ideas forum instead. Please help the developers maximize their time by following this guideline.
The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version. (Download it now, or read on for more.)
Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.
Digging in further you might notice that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen. If your screen is narrow and the menu is taking up too much horizontal room, click the arrow to minimize it to be icon-only, and then go to the write page and drag and drop everything from the right column into the main one, so your posting area is full-screen. (For example I like hiding everything except categories, tags, and publish. I put categories and tags on the right, and publish under the post box.)
For a visual introduction to what 2.7 is, check out this video (available in HD, and full screen):
It’s all about you. It’s the next generation of WordPress, which is why we’ve bestowed it with the honor of being named for John Coltrane. And you can download it today.
Last, but certainly not least, this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.
(As with any interface change it may take a little bit of time to acclimate yourself but soon you’ll find yourself whizzing through the screens. Even people who have hated it at first tell us after a few days they wonder how they got by before.)
The Story Behind 2.7
The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.
For some of the back story in the development of 2.7, check out these blog posts (thanks to WeblogToolsCollection for the list):
This was interesting to us, a blogging software release we actually blogged about, but the process was hugely informative. Prior to its release today Crazyhorse and 2.7 had been tested by tens of thousands of people on their blogs, hundreds of thousands of you count .com. The volume of feedback was so high that we decided to push back the release date a month to take time to incorporate it all and do more revisions based on what you guys said.
For those of you wondering why we didn’t call this release 3.0, it’s because we abhor version number inflation. 3.0 will just be the next release after 2.9. The major features in new point releases approach also works well for products like OS X, with huge changes between a 10.3 and 10.4.
The Future
Those of you following along at home might have noticed this was our second major redesign of WordPress this year. Whoa nelly! While that wasn’t ideal, and I especially sympathize with those of you creating books or tutorials around WordPress, there’s good news. The changes to WordPress in 2.5 and 2.7 were necessary for us to break free of much of the legacy cruft and interface bloat that had built up over the years (gradually) and more importantly provide us with a UI framework and interface language we can use at the foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before. So at the end of 2009 I expect, interface-wise, WordPress to look largely the same as it does now.
That said, we couldn’t be more excited about the future with regards to features. Now that we’ve cleared out more basic things, we are looking forward in the coming year to really tackling media handling including audio and video, better tools for plugin and theme developers, widgets, theme updates, more integrated and contextual help, and easier integration with projects like BuddyPress and bbPress.
There comes a time in every WordPress release when it’s ready for the world , to come out of its cocoon and feel the light of the world on its wings for the first time.
Of course if you were already testing 2.7, you can just use the built-in core updater (Tools > Upgrade) to download and install RC2 for you (and later upgrade you to the final release when it’s available) but if not you can use the download link above.
We feel this release is pretty much exactly what we’re going to ship as 2.7, barring any final bugs or polish tweaks that you report or we find.
With the release of RC1, we’re in the final leg of development before the release of 2.7. 280 commits since beta 3 have polished the new admin UI (including new menu icons created by the winners of our icon design contest) and fixed all known blocker bugs.
We think RC1 is ready for everyone to try out. Please download RC1 and help us make the final release the best it can be. As always, back up your blog before upgrading.
The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.
2.6.5 contains three other small fixes in addition to the XSS fix. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision. The second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types. The third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests. For a list of changed files, consult the full changeset between 2.6.3 and 2.6.5.
Note that we are skipping version 2.6.4 and jumping from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds. There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.
We’re excited to be part of the Change the Web Challenge.