Haikus from Jane on her 39th birthday:
Practice makes perfect
is what they say about things,
but sometimes it’s not.
In this case it is
not practice but refinement,
and then more testing.
You can help WordPress!
Now: 3.1, beta 2
is here; needs testing.
But! Remember this:
Only install on test sites,
as YMMV.
The second beta of WordPress 3.1 is now available!
For things to test, please review our Beta 1 release announcement. A list of known issues can be found on our bug tracker.
Already have a test install that you want to switch over to the beta? Try the beta tester plugin. Please test 3.1 on a test site, not on your live site, as interactions with plugins that haven’t been updated may be unpredictable, and we can’t predict (see how that works?) whether something will break or not… that’s why we’re asking people to help us test everything! 
Testers, don’t forget to use the wp-testers mailing list to discuss bugs you encounter. Plugin and theme authors, please test your plugins for compatibility.
Download the WordPress 3.1 Beta 2 now.
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WordPress 3.0.3 is available and is a security update for all previous WordPress versions.
This release fixes issues in the remote publishing interface, which under certain circumstances allowed Author- and Contributor-level users to improperly edit, publish, or delete posts.
These issues only affect sites that have remote publishing enabled.
Remote publishing is disabled by default, but you may have enabled it to use a remote publishing client such as one of the WordPress mobile apps. You can check these settings on the “Settings → Writing” screen.
Download 3.0.3 or update automatically from the “Dashboard → Updates” screen in your site’s admin area.
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WordPress 3.0.2 is available and is a mandatory security update for all previous WordPress versions. Haiku has become traditional:
Fixed on day zero
One-click update makes you safe
This used to be hard
This maintenance release fixes a moderate security issue that could allow a malicious Author-level user to gain further access to the site, addresses a handful of bugs, and provides some additional security enhancements. Big thanks to Vladimir Kolesnikov for detailed and responsible disclosure of the security issue!
Download 3.0.2 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area. You should update immediately even if you do not have untrusted users.
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It’s that time in the release cycle again, when all the features are basically done, and we’re just squashing bugs. To the brave of heart and giving of soul: Won’t you help us test the new version of WordPress? As always, this is software still in development and we don’t recommend that you run it on your normal live site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. If you break it (find a bug), report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it. (Especially you U.S. types who are taking a long weekend for Thanksgiving! )
If all goes well, we hope to release WordPress 3.1 to the world at large by the end of the year, though that is (as always) subject to change/dependent on how the beta period goes. The more help we get with testing and fixing bugs, the sooner we will be able to release the final version.
If you want to be a beta tester, you should check out the Codex article on how to report bugs. Some of the new features to check out include:
There are also some known issues: things that aren’t *quite* finished, but that weren’t worth holding up the beta release. They will be fixed before 3.1 is released for general use. Note that as things get fixed, the beta release will update nightly. What you should know:
- Fatal error: Call to a member function is_page() on a non-object in /wp-includes/query.php. is_page() may be any conditional tag. This issue occurs when a theme or plugin is doing something wrong. Some code is checking the value of a conditional tag before we actually set up the Query, which means they don’t work yet. In 3.0, they silently failed and always returned false. In 3.1 Beta 1, this is throwing a fatal error. This will be handled in the final release, so use this opportunity to fix your plugins. (#14729)
- All known issues slated for fixing before launch are listed in Trac. Please check this list to see if a bug is already on the list before reporting it.
Remember, if you find something you think is a bug, report it! You can bring it up in the alpha/beta forum, you can email it to the wp-testers list, or if you’ve confirmed that other people are experiencing the same bug, you can report it on the WordPress Core Trac. (I recommend starting in the forum or on the mailing list.)
Theme and plugin authors, if you haven’t been following the 3.1, please start now so that you can update your themes and plugins to be compatible with the newest version of WordPress.
Note to developers: WordPress is built by the contributions of hundreds of developers. If you’d like to see this release come out on time, I encourage you to pitch in. Even if you don’t have time to do testing on the beta version, you could help us by contributing a fix for one of the many bugs we already know about.
To those of you in the U.S., have a lovely long holiday weekend, and if you’re looking for something to occupy your post-turkey hours, we hope you’ll take the beta for a spin!
Download WordPress 3.1 Beta 1
This post will be short and to the point: Dan Roundhill announced that a new version of WordPress for Android has been released, fixing numerous bugs and adding the ability to set post status from within the app. Version 1.3.8 hit the Android Market today. For more details, check out the post on the WordPress for Android blog.
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I was just informed that WordPress, in head-to-head voting against Joomla and Drupal, has won this year’s Open Source CMS Hall of Fame award.
We have to be careful because if this trend continues people might think WordPress is a real CMS, useful for more than just a blog. This would ruin our stealth campaign and might bring dozens of new users to the WordPress community. If you could keep this on the DL we’d appreciate it.
We don’t want WordPress to develop a reputation.
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Attention Apple-gadget-owning WordPress users! Have you been using the WordPress iOS app for iPhone and iPad? Or maybe you tried it a while back and thought it wasn’t for you? Either way, the new release — v2.6 — will knock your socks off. Why? A bunch of reasons:
- Video. Record, upload, attach, and play videos within the app. Yay for being able to catch your friends’ and co-workers’ most
embarrassing shenanigans creative moments with iPhone video and publish them immediately for all the world to see on your WordPress site.
- A total rewrite of the way local drafts are handled, to prevent the unintentional loss of your pending posts.
- Autosave/post revisions. Bam! One of the “oh, thank goodness” features of the web app makes it into the iOS version.
- Easier setup. Faster and easier process for adding your sites to the app.
- Media Library. We’re gradually getting closer to the media management you’re used to in the web app.
There are also numerous bugfixes and performance enhancements in this release, so if you haven’t been using the app lately, you should consider giving it another try. I’m personally pretty excited to start using the iPhone version more often now that there are all these fixes and new features. Especially the video upload. You know, for those creative moments that make life fun.
You can read the full 2.6 release post on the WordPress for iOS blog, and can download v2.6 from iTunes/the app store. Happy mobile blogging!
* * *
Not an iPhone user? We’ve still got your on-the-go back! Check out the WordPress apps for Android, Blackberry, and Nokia (beta). They’re all 100% GPL, of course, and we’re always looking for contributors to the development projects, so check the blogs if you have mobile dev skills and want to get involved.
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The WordPress community took a big step forward today when Matt announced that Automattic has donated the WordPress trademark to the non-profit WordPress Foundation. Moving forward, the Foundation will be responsible for safeguarding the trademarked name and logo from misuse toward the end of protecting WordPress and preventing confusion among people trying to figure out if a resource is “official” or not.
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After nearly 11 million downloads of WordPress 3.0 in just 42 days, we’re releasing WordPress 3.0.1. The requisite haiku:
Three dot oh dot one
Bug fixes to make you smile
Update your WordPress
This maintenance release addresses about 50 minor issues. The testing many of you contributed prior to the release of 3.0 helped make it one of the best and most stable releases we’ve had.
Download 3.0.1 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area.
Note: If you downloaded 3.0.1 in the first 20 minutes of release (before 2200 UTC), you’ll want to reinstall it, which you can do right from your Updates screen. Our bad.
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Our approach with WordPress has always been to make it run on common server configurations. We want users to have flexibility when choosing a host for their precious content. Because of this strategy, WordPress runs pretty much anywhere. Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!
First up, the announcement that developers really care about. WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4.
For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.
The numbers are now, finally, strongly in favor of this move. Only around 11 percent of WordPress installs are running on a PHP version below 5.2. Many of them are on hosts who support PHP 5.2 — users merely need to change a setting in their hosting control panel to activate it. We believe that percentage will only go down over the rest of the year as hosting providers realize that to support the newest versions of WordPress (or Drupal, or Joomla), they’re going to have to pull the trigger.
In less exciting news, we are also going to be dropping support for MySQL 4 after WordPress 3.1. Fewer than 6 percent of WordPress users are running MySQL 4. The new required MySQL version for WordPress 3.2 will be 5.0.15.
WordPress users will not be able to upgrade to WordPress 3.2 if their hosting environment does not meet these requirements (the built-in updater will prevent it). In order to determine which versions your host provides, we’ve created the Health Check plugin. You can download it manually, or use this handy plugin installation tool I whipped up. Right now, Health Check will only tell you if you’re ready for WordPress 3.2. In a future release it will provide all sorts of useful information about your server and your WordPress install, so hang on to it!
In summary: WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4 and MySQL 4. WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, will require PHP 5.2 or higher, and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher. Install the Health Check plugin to see if you’re ready!
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