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westi on wordpress

WordPress 2.6.5 has been released, addressing a few small bugs, and a few fringe security issues it seems. At first glance, I thought this was an odd thing, considering 2.7 is around the corner, but after a little thought, it makes sense. One, a security issue was found and fixed, and two, some people (this author for one) dislikes immediately upgrading to the latest and greatest release, so having a secure (as possible) 2.6.x release with a few nagging bugs taken out allows for sites to wait, test out, and take their time to upgrade to the 2.7 release.

WordPress › Blog.

A slew of fixes since b1 are in this release, perhaps too many, suggesting to me that it went beta too quickly, though I’ve never quite grasped beta/alpha/release candidate structures. Every project seems to have their own ideas.

I’ve not tested 2.7 myself, but the comments on twitter and via a few feeds have been positive, what are your impressions?

While reading up on the upcoming changes in WP 2.7,I came across an article aboutThe New 2.7 Dashboard. Tucked towards the bottom was this little ditty:

rather than including something rushed and clunky, we’re holding off until a later version

They were speaking of some “inbox” feature that was temporarily in trunk, but has been removed. I must say, that’s one of the first times I’ve seen that acknowledgment in WordPress development, and more often than naught, it has been the contrary. New features have been thrown in at the last minute, and result in confusion by users, too many bugs to count, and dissatisfaction by long time users. It’s nice to see the prudent approach being taken for a change, particularly in a release that seems to already have quite a bit of change included.

WP Freedom Blog is sponsoring a contest to find the “coolest blogs”. First prize includes $500 cash (via paypal) and $500 in services. 2nd place half that, and 3rd $250 total cash and prizes.

Winners will be selected by voting, after a selection by the host blog of the eligible entrants. To get rules and specifics visit the hosting site, or go visit one of the cooler blogs I subscribe to , Deziner Folio.

A vulnerability in the Snoopy library was announced today. WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard. Although this seems to be a low risk vulnerability for WordPress users, we wanted to get an update out immediately.

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6.3.

Not sure what “low risk” really means, but I never recommend skipping security releases. The official post goes on to provide the affected file, so a full upgrade isn’t necessary, which is nice. Not sure I’ve seen that done in a long time. Guess it’s a case of 2.7 being close, and no desire to roll any other bug fixes in with this release. And because of that, it would seem that doing this upgrade is a no brainer.

New Firefox addon to help user easily get to useful pages in the codex, access admin section of sites user is registered to as well as :

• - Update Notification on new WordPress versions
• - Website Profiles
• - Custom Shortcuts
• - Various preference settings

WordPress Helper :: Firefox Add-ons.

The WordPress Podcast » Blog Archive » Episode 45 - Matt Mullenweg Interview, Automattic acquires Intense Debate, discussion of WordCamps.

Covering a multitude of topics, including lots of WordCamp information, what to expect in 2.7, and new features at WP.com

WordPress Acquires Irish Startup Polldaddy

Like Intense Debate, Polldaddy doesn’t offer its technology to WordPress publishers alone - and it doesn’t plan to phase out its support for other platforms post-acquisition. But we can expect both companies’ efforts to be driven primarily towards improving WordPress - both the open source version offered at WordPress.org

How acquiring a closed source service and rolling it under the Automattic umbrella could at all improve the open source version is beyond me. What would it do to such popular poll plugins that already exist for WordPress, such as Lester Chan’s WP Poll?

What and how Automattic develop wordpress.com should be of no concern, however, as has been the case with gravatars, and certainly some of these other services they’ve acquired, it unfortunately is of concern with those who are worried about the long term development of WordPress.

For quite some time, WordPress plugins have been corralled and housed under the main .org umbrella of Plugin Directory, with fair success. However, themes have languished in purgatory of http://themes.wordpress.net. Back in December of ‘07, big changes were announced, with little follow up, and led to a lock on new themes being allowed to be uploaded by designers, and all in all, a poor experience for viewers. Seems this has changed recently with the addition of themes to the Theme Directory within wordpress.org.

Which sounds great at first look, but then looking at the additional information about hosting your theme, some odd mandatory requirements are listed.

First, and I’ll be the quick to admit it’s difficult to differentiate licenses when it comes to web templates, but requiring a GPL license, when most themes I’ve seen over the years licensed as CC-SA is peculiar.

Second, mandating align classes to be specifically alignleft, alignright and aligncenter is absurd.

And finally, which to me is the real kicker, the theme MUST support Gravatars. Huh? Isn’t Gravatar a 3rd party service owned by Automattic? Why should a theme for an open source blog engine be mandated to support such a 3rd party service? So the theme could easily be used on the for profit wordpress.com site?

In my very so humble opinion, wordpress.org has officially crossed the line of differentiating the free/open source version, and the for profit entity. Heck, they might as well add Akismet as a core component and call it a day.

Shame on you Matt, and shame on those that let these requirements through.

On a side note, I find it surprisingly odd that themes not be widget ready. Go figure.

coffee2code.com » Blog Archive » 14 Days of Plugins

In the end, I managed to release ten new plugins and update everything I had previously released.

Actually, not quite fresh, but considering most people (at least me) had written off coffee2code plugins ever being updated, it was quite refreshing to see that Scott had not only updated all his old plugins, he wrote 21 more!!!

In particular, the Get Custom Field Values plugin was one that I was happy to see updated to current WordPress code. For those not familiar with custom fields, they are quite powerful and are invaluable when hacking WP for more CMS type of of applications.

Anyway, it’s great to see such a useful set of plugins updated and an veteran developer resurface publicly.