Changelogs, Changelogs, Changelogs

A Changelog is a very important thing for a project and until recently it wasn’t easy to add one to your WordPress plugin hosted in Extend.  Some plugin authors understood the benefit of providing there users with the information and were adding it in different places but it was not easy to track down where it was and it some cases your only hope was a trail of clicks across the web to the plugin Authors site to hunt down the post detailing what had changed in this version.

For me, a changelog is a very important thing it is all about justifying to your users why they should upgrade to the latest version of your plugin as well as reassuring them that the changes made have been made for specific reasons and helping them to understand the impact the changes may have on there usage of your plugin.

This has been a hot topic of late and we were discussing it on last nights WP Weekly podcast so I set off to see if I could track down the right person to get a change made to give all plugins a separate top level Changelog tab on there WordPress extend page.

This morning to my delight I found that a Changelog feature had been added and now we have a standardised way for plugins to add Changelogs.  Basically there is a new section in the readme.txt standard which allows for you to document your changelog as your plugin develops.  The new section looks like this:

== Changelog ==

= 1.0 =
* A change since the previous version.
* Another change.

= 0.5 =
* List versions from most recent at top to oldest at bottom.

Which produces the follow style of display on the plugins page in Extend:

Example of the changelog output

And the information will also be displayed in a separate tab in the administration section of your WordPress blog by the plugin installer and updater:

The view of the changelog in the WordPress administration pages

So please go forth and update your plugins readme.txt file and let your users benifit from the information about what has changed between versions.

WordCamp UK – Earlybird ticket sales nearly over

This weekend is special for two reasons, firstly it is WordCamp SF 2009 and I wish I could have made it as it would have been nice to attend the original WordCamp. Secondly it is also your last chance to get tickets for WordCamp UK 2009 at a discounted price.  This is a growing list of confirmed speakers and of confirmed attendees.

Looking forward to seeing some of you there.

WordCamp UK 2009

WordCamp returns to the UK again this year and we hope it will be bigger and better than last year especially as we have convinced Matt to attend this year.

This years uk WordCamp is in Cardiff on the weekend of the 18th/19th July and tickets are already on sale with an early bird discount rate available until 31st May.

If you would like to get involved we are still firming up the speaker schedule so if you have a topic you would like to talk about of see discussed let us know.

We also have sponsorship opportunities available – more information on sponsorship can be found over on the WordCamp UK website.

Looking forward to seeing some of you there.

WordPress plugins milestone

At 8:17am GMT today another WordPress milestone was reached. The WordPress plugins subversion repository received it’s 100000 check-in.

Congratulations to Jeff Yen for achieving this. Maybe you should go check out his Google Maps GPS Link plugin.

Useless graphs (What went before)

Following on from the recent 10000th commit to the WordPress.org Subversion repository I thought I would take a quick look back at some statistics from the past a draw a few interesting graphs to look at how WordPress.org has grown over the past few years.  Enjoy!

WordPress 2.6.5 in detail

WordPress 2.6.5 has been released and includes a number of changes including one security fix, here is a list of the changes in detail:

• Added a check for the correct post_type to blogger.editPost and blogger.deletePost (#8267).
• Updates to update_post_meta() and delete_post_meta() to ensure they work correctly with post revisions and don’t create the meta on the revision instead of the post (#7925).
• Protection for a very difficult to exploit XSS issue (#8291).
• Fix for an XSS issue with the Atom and RSS feeds on some hosting setups ([9754], [9770]).

For a complete list of all the changes you can read this section of the branches/2.6 log on the WordPress bug tracker.

Note that we have skipping version 2.6.4 and jumped from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds.

There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.