westi on wordpress

It has been a busy week again for WordPress 2.4, the changes this week were:

• Improvements and refactoring of the WXR importer including supporting zipped xml files (#5522).
• Changes to allow the salt used by WordPress in password generation and other areas to be overridden using a define ([6478]).
• Documentation for author-template.php, bookmark.php, bookmark-template.php, template-loader.php, compat.php, canonical.php, comment-template.php and file level phpdoc for some other files. (#4393, #5523, #5521, #5513, #5510, #5526, #5528, and #5527 ).
• Improved implementation of the javascript addLoadEvent function to speed up the execution of javascript on admin pages ([6482]).
• Changes to wp-mail.php to escape the error messages when displaying them to avoid a possible XSS attack (#5484).
• Changes to ensure that the post password is only exposed by the xmlrpc method metaWeblog.getRecentPosts to users with rights to edit a post (#5535).
• Changes to the information exposed the wp.getAuthors xmlrpc method to reduce the information exposed and add a capabilites check (#5534).
• Addition of extra capabilites checks to xmlrpc methods ([6504]).
• Addition of extra capabilites checks to APP server ([6508]).
• Changes to validate_file() to improve its traversal attempt detection when running on windows ([6521]).
• Changes to the magic number detection for gettext file loading for better support of 64bit systems (#3780).
• Fixes to the tag extraction code so as to not strip ’s’ from either end (#5539).
• Updated javascript libraries -Prototype 1.6.0 and script.aculo.us 1.8.0 (#5543).
• Introduction of deprecated function and file use tracking functionality to allow for theme and plugin developers to easily identify what is deprecated. (#4361).
• Better documentation for the_author() and prep_atom_text_construct() ([6515], [6516]).
• Final deprecation of comments_rss() and create_user() ([6517]).
• A change to avoid variable expansion in the invalid $table_prefix error message (#5546).

This week the list of changes is quite long event though a lot of time was spent on the preparation and testing of the recent WordPress 2.3.2 maintenance release for which you can read a detailed list of the changes here - don’t forget to upgrade!

You can read more about the support for theme and plugin developers to help identify what deprecated functions or files they might be using in this post - “Tracking deprecated functions”

For even more information on some of the other little changes that went in this week you can read the whole weekly trac timeline.