WordPress.org

I’m very happy to kick off the 1.2 beta cycle tonight. In many ways version 1.2 represents the largest step forward since the inception of WordPress. It’s been a bit over a month since the last version—1.0.2—was released, but the 1.2 branch has been under development since mid-January. Because of the heavy changes to the codebase we have had a prolonged “alpha” period where we worked out some of the basic issues with timezones, unicode, and the new options interface. Here’s a sampling of what 1.2 offers:

• Sub-categories
• Custom fields
• Localization framework and unicode encoding support
• All post times stored in local time and GMT
• Cleaner cruft-free and search engine friendly URLs
• Automatic thumbnail creation
• Strong encryption of user passwords
• Redone administration interface, particularly with regard to options
• Non-mod_rewrite clean links option

And there’s much more. Writing release notes is going to be one of the hardest things about 1.2. The days leading up to the final release are going to be spent updating our documentation, fleshing out wordpress.org to showcase the new plugin architecture, and of course squashing any bugs that may come to light.

As always, testing and feedback in the beta forum is very much appreciated. The beta packages are available in the usual place.

The talk of the town is that WordPress is going the l10n-i18n way. But what exactly does that mean?

l10n stands for localization, and i18n, for internationalization. Counting the number of letters between the first and the last letters in those words explains the numbers in the names. Laziness is universal! The difference between l10n and i18n is that l10n involves the linguistic adaptation of a product to a specific language or culture, and i18n involves making the functional changes to a product to make it localizable, so to say.

The internationalization of a product would be very difficult without the help of users themselves. WordPress is no different, with people with different mother-tongues helping in the translation and adaptation of the code.

When the i18n process is complete, WordPress will be available to authors who write in different languages, besides English, including, maybe Chinese. But the Chinese alphabet consists of anything from 3,000 to 50,000 characters. How, then, can you display all, or most of these, on browsers that can only seem to deal with the English Alphabet? Sounds like another article is in the works. 😉

Alex King has release Tasks Pro 1.1, which is amazing task- and project-management software that you have to see to believe. It was already incredibly useful with the last version, and 1.1 offers some cool features like time tracking, file attachments, and theme support. Why am I mentioning this all here? Becuase the WordPress project uses Tasks Pro internally to track and manage bugs and assignments. I’m upgrading our version today.

Dougal is a humble guy and wouldn’t ask here himself, but I have no problem pimping the fact that Dougal is looking for a job in Atlanta. You can read about it more on his site, but basically he has to move because of family reasons. It’s great news… for the company in Atlanta that snaps this guy up first. Dougal’s dedication to his family is just the first of many admirable qualities that make him a great person to work with. So if you or anyone you know has connections in the Atlanta, Georgia area, be sure to get in contact with Dougal.

I put together a quick method that allows you to redirect old Movable Type entries without leaving the old files around. The method, which uses .htaccess, is on the wiki, redirect MT links using .htaccess. Shelley used this with some modifications.

Recently, there’s been quite a few ‘switchers’ from MovableType to WordPress noted here in the devblog, with an attendant rise in MT-related questions in the forums. For those of you switching (or considering the move) the following recent articles will be of great use:

Shelley Powers at Burningbird has written several articles detailing her move to WordPress; these are perhaps the most helpful:

• Moving to a New Weblogging Tool discusses her decision to change blogging tools and the factors that led her to choose WordPress.
• Making the Move from MovableType to WordPress details her experience with the process of migration.

Carthik has written a detailed guide for importing your MT entries into WordPress over here.

Last but not least, Gregory Auld at stuff/things has written the first in a series of articles comparing the templating systems of MovableType and WordPress.

With all that’s been going on with WordPress development lately [see the nightly builds, or the CVS for alpha versions of version 1.2], one might reasonably wonder, what’s going on with the damn docs? Well, I’m here today to address just that question.

Read on for more »

It’s only Monday and we already have several new switch stories for you. Thanks to everyone who mailed in!

x.blog

My first impression on WP is very positive. By now, I’m convinced that my MT set up going crazy was a blessing in disguise.

I was used to the (awkward) MT templates and stuff and it took me about 3 days straight to get the hang of WP and customize everything. By now, I’m convinced WP is a superior product than MT. The way the index file uses regular PHP makes customization painless and the admin interface is crystal clear.

Chris’ Corner

So about a month or two ago I started to look around for new blogging software. Somehow (for some reason I can’t remember how at the moment), I stumbled upon WordPress, a PHP-based blog that has gotten great reviews by bloggers for its speed, flexibility, power, and ease-of-use. What a nice combo, cannot be true I thought.

I was wrong. It was all true. I literally had a test installation of WordPress up, running, and my first post as we speak in just 5 minutes. All from lying down on my bed at 11:50 PM EST, laptop on my lap, on a wireless connection to my parent’s cable Internet connection.

Shattered Sun

And let’s not even go into the rebuilding aspect, which just dies on the slowest machine in my house. I realize that machine is way too old, but it handles WordPress without a blink. That is important to me. I want something that doesn’t bog my computers, no matter how old they happen to be. I also wanted something that I didn’t have to take an hour to install every time I chose to get a new server. I realize that I’ve only had to do it twice for myself, but that’s 2 hours of my time that I could’ve spent doing other things.

Finally But She’s A Girl has a very interesting entry about her switch, and I’ve just taken the smallest slice of it here. She’s going to blog more about her switch in the future so she’s worth watching. Her site looks good too.

I tried a number of different blogging tools, but eventually settled on WP after setting up a test blog and playing with it for a while. It’s a great system—extremely easy to install and configure, and yet with a lot of scope for advanced customization. Better yet, it’s Open Source, so anyone can contribute hacks and fixes for it. It’s also free as in beer.

First off, happy Easter to everybody. I came across three more switchers today. Remember if you blog about your switch to send me an email.

Mickey’s Musings

I’ve now moved to WordPress a PHP-based blog that has most of what I was looking for in a blog. Most importantly, it has the ability to submit blog entries via email. I think I will really like that functionality and think it will help me to post more often and from more places.

MT Politics

After doing that, I thought, “Well, why not give it a test drive over at my own place?” So I did, and I liked it. A lot.

Instead of umpteen rebuilds every time something is changed, WP builds everything on the fly. So, when you squash a troll, or delete some spam, it’s gone immediately, without having to rebuild the main page, the comment archive, and the individual (and/or monthly) archive.

Xhale.org — It ain’t over till the fat buddha sings

Why oh why do I insist on continuing to test every blogging package out there – even signing up to Typepad (again !), when the perfect beast is sitting on my hard drive gagging to be uploaded, styled and posted to ? WordPress does all that I need and then some. It’s free, well constructed, full of advanced features and hence should be my first and last choice of blogging script.

There is an interesting thread on the forums with a few tips on how to set up PHP/Apache/MySQL on your local windows machine. I must admit in the past I’ve always done my work either directly on the server or uploading after every save, because I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with two radically different enviroments. However as I commented in the thread, I’ve recently gotten a good enviroment set up locally and while I haven’t started using it for testing yet, it’s fantastic for running web-based applications like Alex’s Tasks.

Several more blogs have made the switch to WordPress and written about it:

King of Nothing

The first thing that impressed the hell out of me was how easy it was to install WP — I had a working copy in 3 freakin’ minutes. Not only that, but WP imported 3 years worth of posts in 10 seconds! Heck, it took me over a day to get MT running simply because I had to ask my webhost to go fetch a dozen PERL modules just so I could get the installation to run.

Just A Girl

Of course, I realized I was doing it to myself. All I really needed to do was open up that program that I downloaded months ago and take a look inside the wrappings and see what all the hub bub is about. I’d prove them wrong. I was happily existing within my MT environment, thankyouverymuch.

Then I looked. It was…*sniff*…beautiful.

No rebuilding! Only THREE basic templates to do – not 8, or 9 or 10! The ability to password protect entries! The cute little smilies built right in!