WordPress has a table for handling metadata of posts. Quite simply, it’s a good place to store “stuff” that relates to a post, but doesn’t belong in one of the standard parts of the posts table. Metadata can be nearly anything. And it can be displayed however a theme wants to display it. You can grab it all and list it out together (as was a common use case for WordPress’ early blog structures). Or you can control what metadata […]
WordPress 3.9, “Smith”, has just been released. It is named after James Oscar “Jimmy” Smith. WordPress 3.9 is the hard result of hard work from 267 contributors. The WordPress 3.9 release was led by Andrew Nacin and Co-led by Mike Schroder. I will have Andrew and Mike, plus three additional contributors on a live hangout tomorrow at 2 p.m. Eastern time, and we’d love for you to join us. Get to know Smith first with this introductory video, produced by […]
Last week’s 3.8.2 security release introduced a bug where drafts written with the Quick Draft tool in the dashboard were not saved. That bug is fixed with today’s 3.8.3 release. What’s really interesting about this release is that not only is the bug fixed, but discarded draft posts will be restored, if possible.
It’s possible that the quick draft you lost last week is still in the database, and just hidden from view. As an added complication, these “discarded drafts” normally get deleted after seven days, and it’s already been six days since the release. If we were able to rescue your draft, you’ll see it on the “All Posts” screen after you update to 3.8.3. (We’ll also be pushing 3.8.3 out as a background update, so you may just see a draft appear.)
Kudos to the core team for going the extra mile to attempt to reduce the impact of this bug, which is already an edge case. In today’s announcement post, Andrew Nacin notes “…any loss of content is unacceptable to us,” and it’s clear that this isn’t just a superficial claim.
Read more @wordpress.orgAll of your websites are ready for updates. There is a security and maintenance release ready for WordPress 3.8.2 and WordPress 3.7.2. It’s being released for both 3.7 and 3.8 due to the auto-updating feature released in WordPress 3.7.
One of the items updated was to address the processing of pingbacks. The fix is identical to the one released in Akismet recently, and you can view the ticket as well, which notes that the Akismet team coordinated their fix with the WordPress core team.
If your websites are detected to be under version control, you’ll still need to manually deploy these updates, but websites with auto-updates turned on or folks with hosts that update for them will see these updates happening very soon.
Along with this release, WordPress 3.9 has entered its first release candidate stage. This means that as long as nothing new and unexpected pops up, we’ll be ready for the full release on April 16th.
Now is the time to do your final testing for WordPress 3.9, and if you are a plugin or theme author, you should have already tested your stuff. If you have anything that needs updating, you’ll want to get them ready, because you have one week before the official release.
Read more @wordpress.orgThe biggest feature lacking in WordPress is portability. We have an exporter for post content, but this exporter omits settings, widgets, theme options, and a large swath of data necessary for truly moving a site from server A to server B.
For WordPress’ future to remain bright, this is a deficiency we absolutely must address. This post is a good starting point for a discussion on how WordPress could be made more portable.
Read more @eamann.comWordPress 3.9 Beta 1 is out and ready for you to test.
There are loads of enhancements that you can see a basic description of and hop into the tickets on Trac where they were hashed out. I’ll be covering the new features in much more detail with the official release.
Importantly, if you are a developer, there may be some changes to consider for your themes and plugins, and Andrew Nacin has shared some of the things to especially be on the lookout for. Don’t wait until 3.9 is officially released at the end of the month.
I’m always impressed with new WordPress releases, but the updates in 3.9 really polish a bunch of long-standing pain points in WordPress, and I’m looking forward to it. Also, if you’re on WordPress.com, you’ll see some things from WordPress 3.9 show up in your dashboards very soon.
Finally, as noted in the post, do check out Mike Schroder’s Week in Core summaries he’s been doing. They are an outstanding way to get caught up on what’s going on. I hope these continue well beyond the 3.9 cycle.
Read more @wordpress.orgSince WordPress 3.6, it’s been possible for theme developers to optionally add HTML5 support for search forms, comment forms, and comment lists. With WordPress 3.9, that optional support will be extended to galleries.
The new default gallery markup will use <figure> and <figcaption> for those themes that enable it.
This is a good thing. And Konstantin Obenland has put together a quick snippet to show theme authors how to enable support for this feature, as well as create both forward and backward compatibility, as they’ve done with the Underscores theme.
Read more @themeshaper.comThere are a number of things that concern me in regard to WordPress comments. They are one of those features that I have a love hate relationship with. Comments are great for active, well moderated communities. I genuinely enjoy receiving comments from Post Status readers, where people often add value to the conversation. For many websites, comments can be a sad and inactive wasteland or a trollfest. For most business and corporate websites I’ve worked on, comments are not wanted at […]
WordPress 3.9 hasn’t quite reached beta, but many of us are already looking ahead to WordPress 4.0. I know, I know: 4.0 is no more significant than 3.9 or any other major release. It just so happens that WordPress’ twenty-third major release will be labeled 4.0. But we know — even those of us who know that 4.0 is just 4.0 — that we’ll be just a little more excited about 4.0 than a normal major release. We remember 3.0. It […]
I tried to find something like this yesterday and had a hard time. I stumbled across it today finally: a list of current “features as plugins” that are being worked on, along with helpful information on their status. This will be a helpful reference for those that want to get involved or just generally track what’s happening with WordPress core development.
Read more @make.wordpress.org