WordPress 3.2 is available
WordPress 3.2 has officially been released. You can either update right from your dashboard or download it from WordPress.org. The main focus of this release was to speed everything up. Lighter and faster was the goal and we definitely accomplished it. The dashboard loads faster than ever before, as does every other admin page.
The speed difference is amazing and you can expect it to get faster still in the versions to come. The main reasons are that we have stopped supporting ancient (in internet time) software. The WordPress admin no longer supports Internet Explorer 6 (a 10 year old browser that even Microsoft wants to see disappear) and bumped the required PHP version to 5.2.4 and the required MySQL version to 5.0. Well over 90% of all WordPress installs will be completely unaffected by these changes in the system requirements, but for those of you on older versions a quick E-Mail to your hosting provider will probably get you what you need.
Additionally in 3.2 Distraction Free Writing was introduced. You can now go full-screen when writing a post and see nothing but the text you are typing. All the extra things that normally distract you simply fade away, letting you really focus on your writing. I honestly wasn’t very sure about this feature during the planning phases of 3.2, but having used it and tested it throughout the process, I can say that I was converted. I definitely recommend everyone try it out and see how much time you save while writing your posts!
There are a ton of other small enhancements in 3.2, but the last ones I want to mention are a couple new links in the footer of WordPress admin. One says “Freedoms” and one says “Credits”. WordPress is licensed under the GPL and the Freedoms link takes you to a page that explains in relatively simple terms how you benefit from this particular license. The Credits link will show you who you can thank for WordPress 3.2. Well over 100 people contributed to making WordPress 3.2, and here you can see who those people are as well as see a list of third party libraries that WordPress uses. If you get a chance, thank these people for helping to create a great product that you can use for free!
WordPress Q & A
I realize that I’ve done a horrible job of posting here over the last year. I made exactly two posts in 2010. However, just because I haven’t been posting here doesn’t mean I’ve disappeared. I’ve still been working on WordPress, WordPress powered sites, WordPress plugins, and even some side projects built on WordPress (Like Beer?). My biggest problem is deciding what to write about, so I’ve come up with a solution. I’m going to answer your questions. Not only will this help me come up with ideas of what I should write about, it will also make sure that my content is specifically useful to you.
So, if you want to know how to best use WordPress’s built in http class to integrate with an existing API, how to add your own taxonomies to your site, how to make your theme more extensible, or almost anything else WordPress related, please just ask!
WordCamp SF 2010
I know this post is quite delayed, but I wanted to get it out there anyway. Last year I went to WordCamp SF and attended several of the sessions. This year I went to WordCamp SF 2010, but things were a little different. I ended up spending most of my time at the Genius Bar helping the attendees with WordPress. The Genius Bar was organized by Lloyd Budd, and while I only volunteered for a single session there, I found it hard to pull myself away from helping the various interesting people that showed up. The questions ranged from how to scale up because of a large influx of traffic, to “How do I get downstairs?” (hint: we were downstairs).
Following the WordCamp event, my wife and I went to one of the best food and wine events we’ve ever attended. It was at a place called One Market, and was put on by The American Institute of Wine & Food. We had lamb starting with the tongue and cheek, working our way back to the leg. Each course was paired with one or two wines from the Zacherle or Fisher labels, and the wine makers were there to talk about each wine and answer our many questions (who knows what a “brick” is in wine making, and why some wines need fewer bricks than others?). It was a beautiful, fancy, entertaining dinner.
When we finished that, we caught a cab over to the Automattic Lounge at Pier 38 to catch part of the WordCamp after party. Talk about a shock to the system. We left a place where lamb was being served to people in suits and fancy dresses who were seated at tables with linens and full silverware sets, and within minutes we were at a party with blaring music and full of geeks, many of who had consumed considerably more alcohol than recommended. We spent a little time saying hi to everyone, having a few laughs at the expense of the imbibed (you know who you are), and I got my picture taken with several people (I’m not sure any of them knew who I was, they just seemed to like posing with someone and getting their picture taken). We left relatively early, around midnight, and headed back to the hotel. I knew from the year before that the developer day was going to be my personal favorite part of the event, and I didn’t want to be falling asleep at the laptop all day.
The following morning I arrived back at the Pier 38 lounge to find that I was the first to arrive for the developer day (I was a few minutes early). Ryan Boren was the next to show, but we ended up having to wait a little longer until someone with keys arrived. I’m not sure people really got the “unconference” thing, as everyone kept wanting to know what was scheduled for when, and where things would be happening. The basic idea is simply “find people that want to discuss what you want to discuss, form a group, and discuss it.” Eventually a group of us formed at one of the tables and began working on WordPress 3.0. I’m sure I can’t name everyone, but I know Dion Hulse, Ryan Boren, Andrew Nacin, Matt Martz, Pete Mall, John Jacoby, and Ptah Dunbar were all there. Dion and I spent several hours on an elusive bug with a rather simple fix, and it was really great to finally get to put faces with the names and handles that I see regularly on IRC, mailing lists, Trac, etc.
After the dev day coding, several of us walked down to Gordon Biersch, had dinner together and tried not to talk about WordPress too much (although Andrew Nacin’s like a machine…you just can’t stop the man!). So, what do you think we would do after a long day of coding? Well, we’re geeks, so we walked to one of the hotels were a few of the guys were staying, went up to their lounge, and started doing some more coding. As a guy who works from home and tends to work only with remote programmers, it was really nice to spend some time with people that understood what I was saying! I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again next year.
Google Summer of Code 2010
It’s official (and has been for a few days, I’m a little behind schedule), the 15 students selected to work on WordPress this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code have been announced. The lineup is pretty great. There are some names on the list that will be familiar to those who are already involved in the WordPress development community. Andrew Nacin for example was given WordPress core commit access in February. Also,
Justin Shreve and Daryl Koopersmith both participated in last year’s GSoC (quite successfully).
This year there are a lot of great students and projects. I’m definitely excited to see what happens with all of them. However, I’m most excited about the student that I’m going to be mentoring. Jon Stacey is going to be implementing stream wrappers into the WordPress file API. He did a similar project for Drupal as part of GSoC last year, and this year we were able to woo him over to WordPress.
Not only does the project have great potential, but since stream wrappers were introduced in PHP 5, it will help push WordPress toward PHP 5 as a minimum requirement (which I’m all for). So good luck to Jon and all the 2010 GSoC students.
Looking forward to WordPress 2.9
The release of WordPress 2.9 is still a little way off. However, there’s already enough to get excited about. I’ve seen some of the media stuff, which allows you to crop and rotate images when you upload them, and it’s brilliant. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but it’s not finished yet so that’s to be expected. They’ve also updated TinyMCE to the latest version. Since the visual editor continues to be the bane of my existence, I’m always happy to see improvements to it. However, I’m a plugin author and programmer, so these front end changes aren’t what I’m most excited about.
They have changed how contact methods in a user’s profile are handled. Now, thanks to Joost they are completely filterable. You can add and remove contact fields as you please, making your user info exactly what you want it to be. For example, if you don’t use Yahoo Messenger but you do use Twitter, you can simply do this:
function twitterNotYim( $contactmethods ) {
// Add Twitter
$contactmethods['twitter'] = 'Twitter';
// Remove Yahoo IM
unset($contactmethods['yim']);
return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter('user_contactmethods','twitterNotYim');
They’ve also added PUT support to the WP_Http class. Ever since the class was added in 2.7, I’ve been enjoying the ease and reliability it offers for making HTTP requests. It’s finally fleshing out to be a full featured API, and I use it in everything from Twitter Widget Pro to my PayPal Framework.
Lastly, and the most exciting thing in my opinion, is the new JSON class. JSON, short for JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight computer data interchange format. It is a text-based, human-readable format for representing simple data structures and associative arrays (called objects). It has quickly become a standard for both AJAX calls as well as transferring data between sites. Popular sites like Twitter, Flickr, and del.icio.us all offer JSON versions of their APIs which allow for faster applications due to the reduced transfer. Twitter Widget Pro now uses this class (I packaged it with the plugin for those not using 2.9 yet).
GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer?
Matt Mullenweg asked the Software Freedom Law Center whether WordPress Themes are GPL too. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
As a huge proponent of the GPL, this is exciting. However, as Joost pointed out in On the GPL, Themes, Plugins & Free, there’s some disappointment as well. The exciting part is that a question that’s long been asked has been answered by a “pro” (albeit a biased “pro”), and the answer is just what many of us wanted to see. Now we can get some people to focus on commercially supported GPL themes rather than just themes with more restrictive licenses. They have even added a Commercially Supported GPL Themes page to wordpress.org! That’s awesome, and a great followup to Matt’s “State of the Word” talk at WordCamp San Francisco.
So what’s the problem? Well, Matt has said that the plugin developers have been the rock stars in the WordPress community, and it’s time for the theme designers to shine. I have no problem with the theme designers getting to shine, but as a plugin developer I wonder “Where is the Commercially Supported GPL Plugins page? I love to give to the community with GPL WordPress plugins, and will continue to do so, but I’ll also be offering premium support for many of these in the future. I’d like to see the same treatment for theme designers and plugin developers.
Having said all that, I’m really glad to see the GPL themes page and I think it’s a good step in the right direction.
WordPress Developer Meeting – July 01, 2009
The developers had another IRC meeting today, and we discussed the media overhaul for 2.9 & 3.0. The idea is to do a two step process, laying down a lot of groundwork in 2.9 and finishing up in 3.0. Jane will be adding a post and later a poll to get community feedback on some of the items discussed, but here’s a list (in no particular order) of some of the things that will be considered for 2.9 & 3.0:
- post thumbnails
- media albums
- bulk media import API
- make adding embeds easier (like viper plugin)
- enable most media settings as defaults that can be overridden on a per image/file or per-use basis
- cropping, resizing, and rotation (in 90 degree increments) for image uploads…I’m excited about this one
- Custom Image Sizes. Instead of hardcoded thumb, med, large (manually configuring maximum image sizes for small, thumbnail etc)
- page exclude plus reorder for blog navigation
- media metadata
- uploader feature: ability to choose from most recently used/most often used/marked as favorite files
- more default shortcodes. check top ten from wp.com. slideshare and any place that advertises wp.com shortcodes
- importers (specifics TBD)
- UI header brushup and uploader UI
Plenty of other things were discussed, such as “lightbox by default” for images, but the consensus was that there are good plugins for this. We also discussed post types (examples of post types: book review, recipe, essay, aside), which would let you choose a type for your post and treat it differently based on what you choose (currently posts, pages, and attachments are different “post types”). The idea is to allow users (or plugins) to easily set up different post types. This will be put off until 3.0, but it’s still exciting!
State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 2
If you missed it, make sure to check out State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 1.
“WordPress should be invisible” was something I loved to hear Matt Mullenweg say during his “State of the Word” address at WordCamp San Francisco. What did he mean by that? He was trying to say that WordPress should be out of the way so you can focus on your content. This means a few things. First, WordPress needs to be extremely easy to use so you don’t have to think about what you’re doing, and fast so it’s not frustrating to use. Second, WordPress needs to be powerful so that you’re never in a position where it’s keeping you from doing what you want. Lastly, in order to accomplish the first two things, WordPress needs to be flexible and have supporting tools. If you try to make it do everything, then it will end up too complex. If you make it too simple, it won’t do everything. Flexibility and plugins is the only way to have the best of both worlds.
State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 1
Matt‘s “State of the Word” address has become a staple at WordCamp’s, and now I see why. There was a lot of generic background info that’s common knowledge to anyone that knows much about WordPress. Even most of the current info was common knowledge to most of the people that follow the Subversion updates and idles or participates in the WordPress-dev IRC channel. However, there were also some great nuggets of information that came through. Enough that I was a little overwhelmed as I tried to get it all into one post, so I decided to break it up into a few posts.
Matt started with a quick history of WordPress. For those that don’t know, WordPress was a fork of B2 and was later officially recognized by the B2 creator as the “official” continuation of B2. A couple of the more major milestones he mentioned include that plugins were introduced in WordPress 1.2 and themes were introduced in WordPress 1.5. He then proceeded to give some rather impressive statistics. They’ve had nearly 10 million downloads in the last twelve months, nearly twice what they had in the twelve months prior to that. They are tracking approximately 5.5 million installed (.org) blogs.
WordCamp San Francisco 2009
I’m going to be heading out to the airport in just a few minutes to catch a flight to San Francisco for my first WordCamp. I’ll admit that while I’m excited about the event I’m also really curious about the particular dynamic. I’ve been to quite a few conferences, but they all seemed to target a specific level of user. For example, the PayPal conferences that I’ve been to are for developers, specifically developers participating in their PayPal certified developers program, which I do. WordCamp, however, seems to have core developers, plugin authors, theme developers, and even fairly casual users. It’s an interesting idea, but will it make for a better conference or a more awkward one?
Either way, I’m even more excited about the next day which will be a WordPress developer day. It sounds like there will be some very interesting open-style discussions about WordPress. Everything from where it’s faults and weaknesses are, to how to best use it as a full-featured CMS, to it’s future and where it’s headed.
I’ll keep everyone updated here as well as on twitter @wpinformer. I’ll tag stuff with #WordCampSF for those trying to follow the whole event.
WordCamp San Diego 2012
I'll be speaking at WordCamp San Diego this year on Integrating WordPress with External APIs. We'll look at how to use the WordPress HTTP class, as well as how to handle incoming notifications form services like PayPal. This is an event you don't want to miss!-
