WordPress.org

We are very happy to announce that Donncha O’Caoimh is the newest member of the WordPress team. Donncha is the developer of the very mature b2++ product and we will be merging the best of the two projects with Donncha’s able help.

I am very happy to announce that the first release of WordPress is now available for download. A full change log is available, but here is a brief overview of the new features.

• Texturize — So good it’ll make your quotes curl.
• WordPress Links — A link manager with everything you’d expect, from Weblogs.com support to a handy bookmarklet. Manage as many blogrolls as you like, and have complete control over their display.
• XHTML 1.1 — WordPress is compliant with XHTML standards up to 1.1, though by default it sends a 1.0 document type to avoid compatibility issues.
• Highly Intelligent Line Breaks — Occasionally called “nl2br on steroids,” this brand new function adds line breaks except where there is already a block level tag or another line break.
• New Administration Interface — We’ve made it as simple as possible, and no more. Everything has been restructured from the ground up in a fully compliant XHTML/CSS interface.
• Manual Excerpts — This allows you to handcraft summaries of your posts to appear in your RSS feed and other places.
• New Default Templates — Again we’ve streamlined theses with the latest in simple, easy-to-understand standard XHTML and CSS. And not a CSS hack in sight.
• Plus numerous behind the scenes code cleanups, making this release faster and more stable than ever.

WordPress is available completely free of charge under the GPL license. Enjoy!

There’s a new beta up, same bat channel. This has a much cleaner include scheme that should work on restrictive hosts and avoid a lot of the problems people were having. There are a ton of other fixes here as well, so check it out.

Before we do a release to the world we really need some testing on the .7 beta, which is now available as .zip and .tar.gz in the beta directory.

If you have any problems or comments you may contact me directly or post to the new Beta forum.

Thanks for your help.

In case you missed it, Michel has announced that WordPress is going to be the official b2 branch “once they get a release out.” Needless to say we are working on doing so as soon as possible. If you would be willing to alpha test releases in order to help us iron out some final issues please let me know in the forums.

Those of you following the CVS may have noticed the flurry of activity in the past 48 hours. A lot of things have come together quickly, and here’s just a quick update of what’s happening:

• We’ve ironed out a few bugs with the excerpts functionality, it’s now 100%.
• WordPress Links — Mike has taken his excellent Links script and intergrated it with the WordPress architecture. It now has Weblogs.com and Blo.gs support, so it can be a complete drop-in replacement for Blogrolling or any other blogroll service. It also has some exciting new features which currently no other service offers. Best of all, it’s fast! Right now I’m working on an import tool which will allow this to import and export to OPML.
• Texturize — Texturize is a tool which intelligently fixes up plain text to be more typographically correct, this includes curly or smart quotes, em and en dashes, proper ellipsies, encdoded ampersands (for those pesky URLs), and a number of other things.
• Intelligent Line Breaks — Instead of “stupidly” putting a break at the end of every new line, this tool—which is enabled by default—creates paragraphs out of blocks of text, breaks where they are needed, and avoids putting breaks or paragraphs where there are already block-level tags.
• Default template — WordPress is now out of the box XHTML 1.1 compliant, though we send a XHTML 1.0 DOCTYPE to avoid compatibility issues. The new layout uses hack-free CSS that is easier than ever to customize.
• New administration interface — We’re making it as simple as possible, and no more. It should load faster and be more intuitive, and it’s only going to get better as we approach 1.0.

Basically the next few days we’re going to be wrapping things up and packaging them for a release. Stick around. I also need to update the dev blog with the latest version.

Excerpts seems to be working now. Includes auto-populating excerpts when none exist (e.g. for old posts). Used in the RSS/RSS2/RDF output (configurable), but could be used for on-page headlines, or as a lead paragraph, etc.