A weekend present, in haiku:
Last call; final bugs
Itch, scratch, contort; calmly wait
For now: RC3
That’s right. What will hopefully be the final release candidate, RC3, is now available for download and testing.
Plugin developers: test your plugins!
When I was a kid my dad used to practice his typing skills (on a real typewriter no less) with the phrase:
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
For some reason that has stuck with me all these years. Today I’m going to rephrase and re-purpose that line:
Now is the time for great theme developers to come to the aid of their community.
The theme directory has been chugging along for more than a year now. During that time we’ve tinkered with the review process and some of the management tools, but haven’t really opened it up as much as we’d like. It’s time to rip off the band-aid and take some action; to that end, we’re looking for community members to help with the process of reviewing themes for the directory.
Right now this is a bit like a New Year’s resolution to exercise every day: it’s what we need to do, but we’re still figuring out exactly how it will all work. That’s part of the community involvement as well — we expect that those who pitch in will also help shape the process.
What’s involved in reviewing themes for the directory? There are some obvious things, such as being familiar with PHP and WordPress theme code (and the theme development checklist), with an eye for security issues. You would also need to have the ability to set up a separate install of the latest version of WordPress for testing theme submissions.
Hopefully a few talented theme developers are reading this right now and saying to themselves, “I’d love to help! How do I to get started?” Just join the new theme reviewers mailing list and we’ll get you up to speed on this new opportunity to come to the aid of your community.
As Matt teased earlier, the first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 3.0 is now available. What’s an RC? An RC comes after beta and before the final launch. It means we think we’ve got everything done: all features finished, all bugs squashed, and all potential issues addressed. But, then, with over 20 million people using WordPress with a wide variety of configurations and hosting setups, it’s entirely possible that we’ve missed something. So! For the brave of heart, please download the RC and test it out (but not on your live site unless you’re extra adventurous). Some things to know:
If you are testing the RC and come across a bug, you can:
We hope you enjoy playing with the 3.0 RC as much as we’ve enjoyed making it for you. Enjoy!
Has it really been seven years since the first release of WordPress? It seems like just yesterday we were fresh to the world, a new entrant to a market everyone said was already saturated. (As a side note, if the common perception is that a market is finished and that everything interesting has been done already, it’s probably a really good time to enter it.)
The growth over the past year has blown me away. Since our last birthday we’ve doubled theme downloads to over 10 million, and doubled plugin downloads to 60 million. Most importantly, we continued to grow the development community to 1,528 people active on Trac and 13 committers, both numbers the highest in the history of WordPress.
That’s 1,528 people pouring their hearts and souls into GPL software we all own, we all build on, we can use as we please, we can all make better. We’ve evolved from a simple script to a web platform.
We’re on the cusp of version 3.0, with a release candidate coming out any minute now.
If you’d like to celebrate WordPress’s birthday with us — tell a friend! Help them upgrade their blog or find the perfect theme. Talk about how WordPress is built by and for a community. Drop in to help test 3.0, including all the plugins you use. Write something to take advantage of the new 3.0 features, or teach your friends how to. If you buy any themes or plugins, make sure they’re GPL or compatible just like WordPress. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, it’s important that we not forget that Open Source got us this far, and is the only way we’re going to get to the next level. The whole of what we can build together is far greater than the sum of our parts. Spread the good word. 
Following the successful post-WordCamp San Francisco code sprint, we are now ready to release the second beta of WordPress 3.0.
Things to test:
Already have a test install that you want to switch over to the beta? Try the beta tester plugin.
Testers, don’t forget to use the wp-testers mailing list to discuss bugs you encounter.
We hope you like it! And if you don’t, well, check back when the release candidate is ready.
Download the WordPress 3.0 Beta 2 now!
A week from today on May 1, hundreds of WordPress users, developers, designers and general enthusiasts will descend upon San Francisco for the 4th annual WordCamp SF. Since that first WordCamp in 2006, back when WordPress was on version 2.0 (Duke), the number of people using WordPress to power their web publishing — from personal blogs to large-scale commercial sites — has grown by millions. It’s no wonder this year’s event is going to be so great.
If you’re unfamiliar with WordCamps, here’s the skinny: the San Francisco event is the flagship, put together each year under the direction of WordPress co-founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg, who traditionally reports on the “State of the Word” and assembles a lineup of speakers that have inspired him over the past year. This year’s lineup includes luminaries such as Richard Stallman, the father of Free Software, best-selling author Scott Berkun, and Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg. As the final speaker list is finalized, the remaining speakers will be added to the WordCamp SF website, but a surprise or two is still possible.
Though the main event is on Saturday, May 1, there are additional days of WordPress goodness in store. Saturday, May 1 will be the main conference with scheduled speakers. There will be keynotes, session tracks for both bloggers/end-users and developers, and lightning talks to provide a broad mix of content, followed by a raging afterparty. Sunday, May 2 will shift location and tone, with a low-key developers’ unconference for the super-code-focused attendees. May 3 and 4 are conference-free, but a WordPress core contributor in-person code sprint will span those two days, bringing together core contributors old and new from around the globe for two days of intense hacking (and let’s face it, 3.0 bug fixes).
If you’re in the Bay Area, or can be, and want to attend WordCamp San Francisco, go get your ticket today!
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It’s definitely WordCamp season; just check out the growing list of upcoming WordCamps over the next couple of months! If you don’t see a WordCamp near you listed here, check the rest of the schedule at WordCamp.org. In the meantime, don’t forget that many WordCamps post video of their presentations on WordPress.tv.
April 24 (today!) – WordCamp Orange County
Irvine, CA USA
April 29 – WordCamp Nashville
Nashville, TN USA
May 1 – WordCamp San Francisco
San Francisco, CA USA
May 8 – WordCamp Paris
Paris, France
May 8 – WordCamp Argentina
Buenos Aires, Argentina
May 8 – WordCamp Chile
Santiago, Chile
May 15–16 – WordCamp Denmark
Copenhagen, Denmark
May 15 – WordCamp Victoria
Victoria, BC Canada
May 21–22 – WordCamp Italy
Milan, Italy
May 22 – WordCamp Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
May 22–23 – WordCamp Raleigh
Raleigh, North Carolina USA
May 29–30 – WordCamp Fayetteville
Fayetteville, Arkansas USA
May 29 – WordCamp Yokohama
Yokohama, Japan
June 5–6 – WordCamp Chicago
Chicago, Illinois USA
June 12 – WordCamp Reno-Tahoe
Reno, Nevada USA
June 12 – WordCamp Vancouver
Vancouver, Canada
June 18 – WordCamp Catania
Catania, Italy
June 19 – WordCamp Columbus
Columbus, Ohio USA
Early next week, we’re hoping to release the 2nd beta release of WordPress 3.0 on our journey toward the final version. There are still over 200 bugs in the 3.0 milestone, and we can use all the help we can get on fixing these problems. If you’re a developer, take a look at the list of bugs that still need fixing in 3.0. Write a patch, or test and give feedback on someone else’s. The tickets around custom post types and taxonomies are especially in need of help. Every little bit helps, so if you’re a developer who’s never contributed to core before, maybe now is the right time! Check out our information on contributing to WordPress core, and head over to Trac to see if there’s a problem you might know how to fix. If you get stuck, need collaborators, or have a question about the best way to approach a fix, hop into the dev channel on IRC at irc.freenode.net, channel #wordpress-dev. Core developers will be around over the weekend working on bugs themselves, so if you’re trying to help, don’t be afraid to ask questions. With your help, maybe by Monday we can knock the bug count down to half of what it is right now. How great would that be? (Answer: pretty great)
The sprint will go full force until Monday afternoon, when the lead developers and core committers will all stop to take a breath and look at the remaining bug reports to see how we did over the weekend, so don’t wait! And thanks!
Summary: A web host had a crappy server configuration that allowed people on the same box to read each others’ configuration files, and some members of the “security” press have tried to turn this into a “WordPress vulnerability” story.
WordPress, like all other web applications, must store database connection info in clear text. Encrypting credentials doesn’t matter because the keys have to be stored where the web server can read them in order to decrypt the data. If a malicious user has access to the file system — like they appeared to have in this case — it is trivial to obtain the keys and decrypt the information. When you leave the keys to the door in the lock, does it help to lock the door?
A properly configured web server will not allow users to access the files of another user, regardless of file permissions. The web server is the responsibility of the hosting provider. The methods for doing this (suexec, et al) have been around for 5+ years.
I’m not even going to link any of the articles because they have so many inaccuracies you become stupider by reading them.
If you’re a web host and you turn a bad file permissions story into a WordPress story, you’re doing something wrong.
P.S. Network Solutions, it’s “WordPress” not “Word Press.”
The deadline for students applying for Google Summer of Code this year is today, at 19:00 UTC. That’s about 3 hours from now. Still working on your application? Double check your time zone here. No late applications will be accepted.
There are a lot of potential projects on our Ideas list, so if you’ve been hemming and hawing over whether or not to apply, this is your last chance for this year. We have great people lined up to mentor the students, including most of the WordPress lead developers, some dedicated core contributors, plugin developers, the BuddyPress lead developers, etc. Google is providing a great opportunity for both students and the open source projects that act as mentoring organizations (like WordPress), so don’t pass it up if you’re an eligible student.
You can’t win if you don’t play, right? Five thousand bucks for two months of coding over the summer with WordPress hotshots. I know a lot of people that would love that deal. Oh, and hey, student girl wonders of WordPress-land: why haven’t you applied yet?
Apply now! (Don’t forget to use our application template.)
Remember when I posted earlier about the Twitter account, and I said that hopefully you’d find out later today what has been keeping us all so busy? Beta testers, this is your moment: the WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 has arrived!
This is an early beta. This means there are a few things we’re still finishing. We wanted to get people testing it this weekend, so we’re releasing it now rather than waiting another week until everything is finalized and polished. There’s a ton of stuff going on in 3.0, so this time we’re giving you a list of things to check out, so that we can make sure people are testing all the things that need it.
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For more WordPress news, check out the WordPress Planet.
There’s also a development P2 blog.
To see how active the project is check out our Trac timeline, it often has 20–30 updates per day.
