WordPress weekly digest 17th December to 23rd December 2007

It has been a very busy week for WordPress 2.4, partly due to a mid week bug-hunt, the changes this week were:

• Introduction of a wp_set_password() pluggable function to allow it to be overridden easily (#2394).
• Changes to is_page() to allow for an array of pages to be specified (#5430).
• Faster rewrite rules for pages for some permalink structures (#3614).
• Escaping added to the POP3 error messages to avoid XSS attacks (#5484).
• Fixes to the valid element configuration of TinyMCE to allow for more valid combinations (#3826).
• Fixes to the tag entry field to avoid erroneous blank tags (#5412).
• Changes to sanitize_title() to allow ‘0’ to be a valid title (#5293).
• New get_search_feed_link() and get_search_comments_feed_link() template tags (#5442).
• Improvements to the relative links provided in atom comments feeds (#5435).
• Addition of an xmlrpc method for deleting categories (#4599).
• Custom field support for the xmlrpc interface (#5148).
• Addition of a password strength meter to the user profile page (#4470).
• Improvements to the strings used where a different message text is displayed for plurals (#4865).
• Add a link to the relevant post to the comment editing screen (#4345).
• Documentation for wp-settings.php (#5211).
• Fixes for some of the NOTICE errors visible when WP_DEBUG is enabled ([6435], [6436]).
• Improvements to the image metadata extraction functionality to ensure we only try and extra metadata from valid file types (#5397).
• Changes to ensure that PNG transparency and alpha channels are preserved during thumbnail generation (#2805).
• Addition of file level documentation to the third party libraries (#5443).
• Changes to the wpdb class to suppress database errors by default (#5473).
• Support for a custom database down page (#5500).
• Improvements to make_clickable() to have different rules for different uri types ([6449]).
• Improvements to the install process to check for valid database connection info (#5495).
• Addition of pages to the things searched (#5149).
• Addition of new actions import_done and xmlrpc_call ([6472], [6473]).

We have also seen the beginnings of the new admin design being checked in. Hopefully next week I will be able to bring you some screenshots!

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