News About WordPress 2.9

Posted by on June 4, 2009 · 5 Comments 

There was a meeting in IRC for WordPress developers yesterday. A release date for WordPress 2.8 was chosen, and they made some great decisions regarding WordPress 2.9 as well. Here’s a quick summary of the things I found important.

For WordPress 2.9, they’ve decided to raise the version of MySQL supported from 4.0 to 4.1.2! That may not seem like much to those of us out there using the latest versions of everything, since version 5.1 is out, 5.4 is in beta, and even 6.0 is under development (and because 4.1.2 was released in May of 2004). However, the big thing that sticks out to me is that 4.1 support subqueries and unicode. Unicode should help for people that are using WordPress in non-English languages, and subqueries should help to greatly simplify queries. Also in 4.1 MySQL added support for the ‘INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE’ syntax which will insert a new row unless that would cause a duplicate primary or unique key, in which case it updates the existing row.

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WordPress Weekly Podcast

Posted by on April 30, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

There are a lot of places to get information on WordPress, this site being one of them. However, information comes in all shapes and sizes. WordPress Weekly is a podcast hosted by Jeff Chandler and David Peralty, that gives you some great easily-digestible news about WordPress. They cover themes and plugins (both popular and little-known), interview people in the WordPress community, talk about news that affects WordPress, and even look at features of upcoming releases. The podcast is interactive, so you can chime in with questions in the chatroom, and possibly even end up “on air”.

If you’re new to WordPress, you’ll find all sorts of useful information, plugin and theme recommendations, and useful tips and tricks. However, I’m definitely no new to WordPress. I know a fair bit about WordPress and would consider myself to be a pretty advanced user/contributor. I’ve written plugins, contributed to the core across several versions, I run plenty of WordPress based websites, and I’ve worked on some pretty high-level sites (such as Harvard’s new Program on Negotiation site). I even follow the WordPress SVN mailing list so I know every change that’s been made to WordPress. So is the podcast for me?

Yes. I rarely get the chance to listen live, but I listen to it on iTunes while I work. Why? That’s simple. No one can know all the available plugins or themes that exist, no one can know what everyone else in the WordPress community is doing. One hour a week gives me a quick overview of what’s been happening, points me to lesser-known plugins, and helps me keep my thumb on the pulse of the community.

Thanks to Jeff and David for their great work!

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