WordPress weekly digest 21st January to 27th January 2008

It has been a busy week again for WordPress 2.5, the changes this week were:

• Performance improvement to the outgoing trackback processing code. (#5699).
• Refactoring of the code in wp-login.php to pull it out into re-usable functions (#5405).
• Improvements to the APP implementation to handle updated timestamps correctly (#5680).
• Improved usability when selecting which name should be displayed publicly for a user (#5508).
• Ensure that the global $post is restored when the query is reset (#5439).
• Improvements to the caching of post-meta to ensure that the cache is correctly invalidated (#5718).
• Changes to the IP address sanitisation code so as to allowIPv6 addresses as well (#4579).
• The beginnings of a new uploader ([6659]).
• A new Manage -> Tags interface (#5684).
• Bumping of the PHP version required to 4.3 (#5416).

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

WordPress weekly digest 14th January to 20th January 2008

It has been a busy week again for WordPress 2.5, the changes this week were:

• Changes to the blogger importer to have a better statement of requirements (#5220).
• Updates to get_sidebar() to allow for multiple named sidebars (#5615).
• Removal of the redundant and slow check on $now in the SQL queries in get_lastcommentmodified() (#5650).
• Changes to the url sanitisation to allow for parenthesis (#5668).
• Fixes to url_to_postid() to ensure it doesn’t mangle the url it is trying to match (#5661).
• Refactoring of the admin code to make the WP_User_Search class available to plugin authors (#5111).
• Changes to wp_tag_cloud() to ensure that it returns the array if 'format=array' is specified (#5155).
• Extensions to the html tags and attributes that kses will allow in posts (#5617).
• Upgrade of the jQuery library to 1.2.2 (#5492).
• Improvements to the plugin error detection code to ensure that the errors are correctly displayed (#5673, #5658).
• Documentation updates for kses.php and pluggable.php (#5641, #5509).
• Initial migration to TinyMCE v3.0 RC1 (#5674).
• New functionality to allow for editing of post slugs within there permalink context (#5679).
• Addition of more do_action calls to the xmlrpc functions (#5686).
• Changes to the APP implementation to ensure that timestamps can be updated on already published posts (#5680).

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

WordPress weekly digest 24th December to 30th December 2007

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.