WordPress.org

Folks, I have just implemented the import of blogrolls (favorites.opml) from blo.gs into WordPress’ Link Manager.
It currently supports just the one file format but I note that blo.gs has several. At the moment, I think that the list of RSS feeds (favoritesRss.opml) would be the only other useful version to support. Someone asked in the forums for a seperate field in the links data structure to store links to RSS feeds and the like. I’m still thinking on that one.

This change is in CVS (just the file links.import.php is required) and will be in the next release.

Mike has posted a great SQL trick to the forums. Old versions of b2 would naïvely enter break tags (<br />) into the database, often breaking block-level code posted or just making formatting awkward. Now that WordPress has the autop function to intelligently add line breaks what do you do about all of your legacy b2 content? Mike (who has entered his sixth month of not smoking, congrats!) offers this quick query:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '<br />', '');

Of course you should always backup your database before doing such an operation.

I’ve been working on two new features that I have personally wanted for a long time and is now available to WordPress users currently through the CVS and eventually through a release. First we’ve separated the post and edit screen. The post screen now has just the form for creating a new post. There is a new edit option on the menu that has a page for recent posts and a page for recent comments. This makes things much faster loading and more efficient.

The second change is with regard to permalinks and their structure. You can see these in action on my site and there is a bit of discussion going on. There is a new options screen that allows you to specific a new structure using a number of variables such as year, month, day, a sanitized title, etc., and then generates the proper mod_rewrite rules to put in your .htaccess file. If you’d like to try this out on your blog be sure to run the upgrade file in the wp-admin directory. These will be developed a lot further, I just wanted to give an update on what’s going on.

I am very happy to announce that 0.72 is now available. Here are some of the new features:

• An important security fix
• Tons of bug fixes
• Password protected posts
• Cursor-aware quicktags (like using a fancy text-editor)
• Improved API support: full or near full support for the Blogger, MetaWeblog, and MT APIs
• New template design from Dave Shea
• New configuration method, no more editing files!
• New Blogger import
• Improved upgrade and install scripts.
• Improved post and edit interface
• RSS feeds for comments
• RSS feeds support Conditional GET
• Improved XHTML auto-formatting
• Improved Link Manager
• Geographical data support
• Improved image upload features
• Improved calendar
• Improved smilies function
• No more invalid characters
• Increased customizability
• And more!

As you can see, despite the small version bump there are a huge number of improvements in this version, and it has been tested more extensively than any version so far. It is available for download from Sourceforge or through other methods.

It’s available in the usual place, we need quick feedback on this.

This release adds several new features and fixes an important security vulnerability. Unless any major bugs are found, this release will be identical to the final 0.72 release.