News About WordPress 2.9
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.
Improve Performance of Your WordPress Theme in 5 Minutes
There’s a quick and relatively simple way to increase the performance of your WordPress theme while reducing overall server load. The problem is that most themes are written to be as portable as possible. This comes in handy because you can just drop in a theme and it works with no editing at all. Unfortunately, it means that a lot of information that never changes is queried from the database anyway. If you want to speed your theme up, you can customize it to your site and reduce database queries. All in about 5 minutes.
