Planet WordPress

I’ll be speaking at the Northern Voices conference in a few months. Will be my first time in Canada.

I’ve noticed a strange upshoot in new and updated plugins released around the WordPress 2.0 milestone. That’s probably a good thing.

Something that was conspicuously left out of the WordPress core (yes, it was on purpose) was a way to manage Roles as an administrator. Well, add this Role Manager plugin to the list of new WordPress 2.0 plugins.

Note that this plugin does not really do anything but manage roles. If your blog has no need to maintain Roles (for example, if you’re the only author) then you don’t need this plugin. But if you have plugins that depend on capability levels, or you want to manage groups of user permissions, then this will allow you to do that.

More details about how the plugin works and what you can do with it are available on the documentation site. This includes not just the admin user interface, but also instructions for how your plugin can cleanly add new capabilities to WordPress that the Role Manager will display in its interface.

Many thanks to David House who helped with a substantial bit of coding on this one.

The WordPress community is very proud to present the next generation of WordPress to the world, our 2.0 “Duke” release, named in honor of jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington. We’ve been working long and hard to bring you this release, and I hope you enjoy using it as much as we’e enjoyed working on it. In this release we’ve focused a tremendous amount on what we believe to be the core of blogging — the writing interface. Before you upgrade from an earlier version, remember that this is a major release and thousands of lines of code have changed. Before upgrading it’s always good, just in case, to make a backup of your database and WordPress files. It only takes a few minutes and gives you a total safety net if for whatever reason things don’t work. It is also probably a good idea to turn off your plugins, and activate them one-by-one after you’ve upgraded. Without further ado, you can download WordPress 2 right now. Read on for more information about what we think you’ll love about Duke.

User Features

• Completely Redesigned Backend — The first thing you’ll notice when you login to your blog is the backend has been completely overhauled for both aesthetics and usability. This is the first iteration of exciting things to come from the Shuttle team of designers that has been volunteering their time, and look for even more aesthetic improvements in the future.
• Faster Administration — Call it AJAX, call it DHTML, call it Larry, but we’ve paid close attention to streamlining some of the most common tasks in managing your blog. For example if you’re writing a post and you can add categories on the fly, much like tagging in Flickr. Also instead of having two separate UIs for “simple” and “advanced” posting, we’ve combined them and let you customize the layout of the page on the fly by dragging and dropping the dialogs around. It saves where you put things so when you return it’s just like you left it. When you delete a comment or category it will fade out without a page load.
• WYSIWYG Editing — WP dev Andy Skelton and the TinyMCE team have done a tremendous amount of work to bring a smooth WYSIWYG editing experience to WordPress. As code purists, we are very picky about what kind of HTML is generated, and while it’s not perfect yet (for instance nested lists can cause trouble) for 95% of what you do post-to-post the WYSIWYG should save you time. And if it doesn’t, you can turn it off on your profile page. One note: Safari and older versions of Opera, both fantastic browsers, don’t yet support everything that’s needed to do WYSIWYG, but we fully expect new versions of those browsers will continue to improve their standards support, so it may just be a matter of time.
• Included Spam and Backup Plugins — We’ve included two of the most popular WordPress plugins: Skippy’s DB backup can backup your database to a file and optionally email you a copy; Akismet is a distributed anti-spam system which gets smarter the more people use it.
• Resizable Editing — This is one of my personal favorite features. Ever been writing a post and that textarea seemed a little small? Happens to me all the time, and our new rich text editor includes a feature that lets you resize the editor on-the-fly by clicking on the corner, just like a regular window.
• Inline Uploading — We’ve optimized our uploader for image, audio, and video files and put it inline with the posting screen. You don’t have to bounce around any more when writing a post! It also will organize your files for you as you upload them to make them easier to find later. On the backend, each uploaded file is actually a “sub-post” so it can have individual comments and pingbacks, its own permalink, and even a custom template based on what type of file it is. You can click on attached files to get a menu of options, or if you’re on Firefox you can drag and drop them into your WYSIWYG editor.
• Faster Posting — In the past if you were linking to a number of posts or pinging a lot of update services, your posting time could appear to slow to a crawl even though everything was instantly done on the backend. We’ve modified how this works now so posting should be near-instantaneous, like everything else in WordPress.
• Post Preview — Another enhancement to the post screen, now when you save a post it shows a live preview of how the post would look on your site, with the stylesheet and theme and everything. No more publishing a post just to see if it works.
• Streamlined Importing — We’ve rewritten our import system from the ground up to be much easier to use (you no longer have to edit files), put it behind authentication, and also made it easy for new importers to be dropped into the system, much like plugins.
• User Roles — We had a ton of feedback on our old numerical user level system. No one was exactly sure what those numbers meant! We’ve distilled the basic functions into a set of roles — such as administrator, editor, contributor — that make it easier to understand what sort of capabilities you’re giving your blog’s users. The new system is completely pluggable too, so plugins can modify roles and create groups that have access to certain things.
• Header Customization — If you’re tired of the blue header in the default theme, you can now change the colors and text of it, which we’ve included as a demo of some of the new features available to theme authors.

Developer Features

On the backend we’ve done a ton of changes to clean up code, make things more consistent, and enable a lot of new types of applications to be built on top of WordPress.

• User Level Options — You can now store options on a per-user level rather than having them apply for the entire blog. An example of this in WP2 is with the rich text editor, which can be turned on or off per a user’s discretion.
• Improved Abstraction — We’ve eliminated almost all direct SQL queries from the code and moved them to functions and classes that make the entire program more consistent.
• Built-in Caching — WordPress now includes a completely pluggable object cache system that cuts the number of queries most pages do in half. By default it is disk-based, but there is already a plugin to use memcached and we expect more are on their way. We’ve only begun to tap into this.
• Plugin Hooks Galore — We’ve added hooks for plugin authors wherever we could think to, so what you’re able to do in the new system is pretty dramatic. Ne features like the WYSIWYG and the inline uploader are completely pluggable and can be replaced entirely.
• Import Framework — The new import framework allows you to create an importer with about a third of the code you used to need, and it can have a consistent interface with no extra work.
• Theme Functions — Themes can now include a functions.php file that will now be loaded like a plugin attached to the theme.
• Theme preview images — You can now include a screenshot of the theme with the download so in the WP interface your users will see a quick preview of what it looks like.
• Hundreds and Hundreds of Bug Fixes — 2.0 has hundreds of tracked bugs and enhancements, many that are very subtle.

You may have noticed our design has changed quite a bit. We’ve also moved WordPress.org to a newer, faster server. There were a few issues with the move which is why we’ve held off for a few days on announcing 2.0. Everything seems to be smooth sailing now.

I’ve noticed that a few people aren’t installing WordPress 2.0. Rather, some folks have tried to install it and decided that it wasn’t ready for them yet. Still other people have decided that 2.0 doesn’t offer them anything beyond what they were getting in the 1.5 code beyond an upgrade headache.

I’ve found a few posts online [1, 2, 3, 4] that talk about the problems they’ve had with 2.0 that have caused them to hold off. But rather than dredge up those posts, I figured I would ask directly.

Why aren’t you upgrading?

I would specifically like to hear from folks who have tried to upgrade and then decided against it for some reason or other.

Please… Reasonable objections. I don’t want to get into a fight, I just want to understand why. Perhaps the community can help work out those issues.

I’m waiting for the inevitable .1 release before upgrading, but I’ve started testing WordPress 2.0. One of the first things I noticed was that the tooltips on the new rich text editor are just plain wrong for Mac users - we gots no “Alt” key, yo!

Mentally replace “Alt” with “Ctrl” and you’ll be fine. I guess we know what platform Matt and company develop on.

I created a bug in Trac and I added a task for myself to create a patch for this (if no one else has), but probably won’t get to it until after January 16th at the earliest.

Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu Plugin for WordPress is something that I’ve been waiting for someone else to write for a long time. If you’re not using this, then you’re certainly not a power user.

I don’t often write about other people’s plugins, but this one is so simple and essential in must be made more public.

Thanks so much for this!

Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system. WordPress 2.0 can make use of memcached by dropping in a special backend for the WP object cache. The memcached backend replaces the default backend and directs all cache requests to one or more memcached daemons. You must have a memcached daemon running somewhere for this to work. Unless you’re managing the server on which your blog is running, you probably can’t run a memcached daemon, making this backend useless to you. The memcached backend is targeted at ISPs and those running WPMU. If you are using WPMU and distributing DB requests across multiple servers, memcached will come in very handy. Using memcached for a single blog isn’t really worth it. In my tests, it was sometimes slower than using the default object cache backend.

To install, copy object-cache.php and memcached-client.php to your wp-content/ directory.

To configure, define $memcached_servers in wp-config.php. This is an array of host and ports to which to connect. By default, the backend attempts to connect to port 11211 on the localhost.

Example server config:

$memcached_servers = array('192.168.1.1:11211', '192.168.1.2:11211');

Yesterday it was announced that Yahoo will bundle WordPress right alongside Movable Type on their website! Matt and the rest of us were keeping mum on everything until yesterday, but now it’s out I can blog this. Matt has links to online coverage of the event.
Me? I think it’s great, the best blogging platform just got a huge boost from a very major player on the Internet! Maybe when I talk to people about blogs in the future they’ll know what I’m talking about!

The new Automattic website launched yesterday too. There’s a little blurb about me on the About page, although I do not drink Murphys except for that time years ago when I drank a pint with a shot of Baileys to help it go down.. that was interesting.

In other news, Performancing for Firefox came out. It’s a blog editor extension for Firefox that looks pretty cool. Unfortunately I’m not using Firefox 1.5 yet so I can’t try it out.

As many of you know, we’re constantly tweaking and updating our web hosting page based on feedback we get from you. Well today we’re very excited to announce we’re adding a new host to the page with a familiar name - Yahoo! We’ve been working with the Yahoo Small Business team to create a solution that gives professional bloggers exactly what they want from their hosting providers.

When we started, Yahoo asked “What would the perfect blog host do?” and their team has been really amazing in executing on a really kick-ass platform for serious bloggers. It took a little while, but slow cooking makes good eating. (Like WordPress 2.0!)

We think the hosting is good for all the baseline features you should expect — tons of storage, bandwidth, Yahoo reliability, etc. (You probably heard all about that in their Movable Type announcement last week.) However we think they’re worth featuring because of three key things:

• With just a few clicks, Yahoo Web Hosting will install WordPress 2.0 complete with a few choice plugins and themes. Setup one blog or two dozen in seconds.
• They will also upgrade your WordPress when a new stable release or update is available, meaning it is a zero-maintenance solution on par with WordPress.com.
• Finally, every Yahoo Hosting customer gets a free Pro-Blogger Akismet license ($5/mo value) and Akismet is auto-enabled on new installations, meaning that spam is less of an issue on Yahoo WordPress blogs. (Much like their stellar email spam handling.) Read more about this.

Guy Yalif from Yahoo says, “We believe that by adding WordPress’ blogging application to our leading web hosting product, we are providing a top notch, scalable, and reliable solution for less than $12 per month.”

We think the above makes a very compelling case for WordPress users to check out Yahoo hosting, and see what we believe is the best WordPress hosting experience on the Web. As always, if you have any feedback on Yahoo or any other host we feature, please let us know.

The next release of WordPress is drawing near. Please help us shake out any last remaining bugs by downloading and testing the 2.0 Release Candidate. If all goes well, the Release Candidate will become 2.0 final. We’re almost there. Download, test, and head over to the Beta Forum to let us know if the Release Candidate is ready for prime time. Downloads taken down. Go get the real thing!