WordPress.org

This is a story about multiple blogs, bugs, enhancements, tables, chairs, and servers.

Everyone wants to know about multiple blogs. We all want it yesterday. To clear up a common misconception, you can already run multiple wordpress blogs just fine, they can even be in the same database. Just give the installations a different table prefix in your wp-config.php file. The goal with multiple blogs is to take the process of setting up a new weblog from 5 minutes to 30 seconds or less. There has been a lot of developer discussion about the best way to go about this and I have a working prototype of the functionality. However to implement this with the elegance you all have come to expect from WordPress is going to take a lot of work. (Code is easy, interface is hard.)

Which brings us to our next release. To satisfy the hype we could say “the very next version of WordPress will have full multi-blog capabilities” and just hold off the next release until that was done, or we could continue to release progressive enhancements while multi-blog work carried on concurrently. The latter is what I’d rather do. There are already enhancements in the CVS that could benefit 1.2 users immediately, and the community at large shouldn’t need to wait for these new features. (Not to mention bug fixes.) An intermediate release would also allow us to lay the framework for multi-blogs and test it thoroughly. That’s the plan. There will definitely be a 1.3 release within the short-term that will feature an improved plugin API, a better administration interface, a few nifty features, and a backend that lays the foundation for the Big Release coming up. There will possibly be a 1.2.1 release if enough issues come up to warrant it.

As a quick note to plugin writers, in 1.3 the table variable names have changed somewhat, for example $tableposts is now $wpdb->posts. This means a lot less globals, and is also one of the framework things for the multi-blog release. Read more about it on the wiki.

Finally, the server. With the up and down of the last few days it would be criminal not to say what’s going on there. To make a very long and frustrating story short: there were problems due in part to the recent popularity of WordPress. They should be fixed for now, but a long-term solution is needed. This will probably come in the form of a Server Drive, where we all drive out to the server and kick it until it works.

Welcome Slashdot visitors, again. Can’t you guys give us a break? 😉

You know the drill, some parts of the site will be static while the wave rides out.

I’ve set up a new mailing list for those who want to monitor the development of WordPress more closely. Whenever anyone makes a commit to the CVS repository it’s sent to the list with a diff of the commit. This may possibly be high traffic and the messages may be large, just a warning. If this sounds like something that may interest you, sign up for the WP-CVS list. Thinks to Michel for doing the hard work involved in this.

First off I wanted to let everyone know that the Ping-o-Matic XML-RPC interface is up and running. So to ping all those services with one fast and automatic step, follow these instructions:

1. Login
2. Go to Options → Writing
3. Erase anything you may have in “Update Services” and just put http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
4. Watch how fast your posting goes

Pinging multiple update services is often the slowest part of any blogging system’s posting, and we’ve designed the pingomatic interface to be as fast as humanly possible. Try it out.

I also wanted to thank Robin Millette for tracking down the CSS that was causing several versions of Mozilla and Firefox to slow to a crawl and often crash on this site. I was perplexed because the markup and CSS validated, and I couldn’t find what could be causing such a bizarre problem. Robin tracked it down to a duplicate body selector that wasn’t really needed so I removed it and the problem seems to have gone away. It was obviously a bug in Mozilla’s rendering engine but it seems to be fixed in the newer versions already. Mozilla bugs like this are so rare I was sure it was a problem with the site. 🙂

I am very proud to announce the immediate availability of the much-anticipated 1.2 “Mingus” release of WordPress. You can download it through the usual methods, though it usually takes a few hours for the SourceForge mirrors to catch up with everything. There are so many new features it’s almost too much for this post, but I’ll squeeze them in. You can view the full changelog on the wiki.

• Sub-categories: Categories can be arranged hierarchically and infinitely deep. Multiple categories combined with sub-categories gives WordPress the most comprehensive taxonomy system of any blogging software available.
• OPML Export and Import: You can import and export OPML to systems like Bloglines or desktop aggregators like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.
• Automatic Thumbnail Creation System: WordPress has a refined upload feature that automatically creates thumbnails any size you want.
• Encrypted passwords and cookies: All passwords in the database and password cookies are encrypted, ensuring maximal security.
• New plugin architecture: The new plugin architecture simplifies modifying or extending WordPress’ features. Plugins can now hook into nearly every action WordPress does.
• Localization of WordPress and Unicode support: The efforts put into internationalizing WordPress have borne fruit, and now you can adapt WordPRess to work in your native language. Several translations are already available.
• Advanced comment moderation: You can now fine-tune your moderation filters in a manner very similar to blacklists for other weblog tools. There is also mass-editing of comments, which makes it a snap to delete hundreds of comments with the click of a button, if necessary.
• Post preview: Near-instant previews while writing or editing articles help you proofread and make improvements before finally presenting your work of art to the world.
• RSS and LiveJournal Importers: The new RSS import script is the closest thing to an universal importer. It allows you to import entries from Radio weblogs even other blogging tools that we may not support specifically. The LiveJournal importer finally lets you have a full blooded self-hosted weblog without losing all your old LiveJournal posts.
• Unlimited update services: Now you can define multiple weblog change monitoring services to be pinged when you post.
• Directory flexbility: Now you can have all the WordPress files in one directory and the weblog in a higher level directory.

There is so much more. I hope you all enjoy this release as much as we enjoyed making it for you. Cheers!

A few issues came up with the last release candidate that made it important to test out the latest changes in a final beta release. Trust me, I’m as anxious as all of you to get my hands on a final 1.2 but this last bit of testing will help us ensure that the much-anticipated 1.2 release is as stable as possible. You can download the release candidate from the beta directory. Timely feedback is crucial at this point, as is reporting on the beta forums. I’ve ugraded a half-dozen blogs I run to this release and I expect it to be near-identical to the final 1.2. Thanks for your patience!

• Mark Pilgrim has a long post on why he’s switching to WordPress.
• Carthik makes switching easy with his comprehensieve summary on migrating from MovableType to WordPress.
• Gregory Auld has published the second part of his series on converting your MT template tags to WP tags.

All the hubbub over the new MovableType terms and people switching to WordPress has been mentioned over on Slashdot. Welcome to all our new visitors!

We’re going to deactivate the forums for a few minutes while we ride out the wave, if you check back later today they should be up.

As I promised the other day, the first release candidate of WordPress 1.2 is available. It’s available from the usual place. We need a real page for beta releases, not just posts on the dev blog and apache indexed directories, I know. It’s on the list! As always, feedback in the beta forum is appreciated.

Carthik Sharma has written an excellent guide for moving from Movable Type to WordPress. It walks you through step by step of downloading, installing, and understanding WordPress. I also like that it has pointers to a lot of documentation resources outside of wordpress.org.

I also wanted to take this oppurtunity to say “howdy” to all the new visitors we’ve been getting the past couple of days. We’ve got a great community here and WordPress gets better every day. (That’s why we have nightly builds!) Please feel free to poke around and explore. If you try WordPress and decide not to use it, please leave a note on the forums or send me an email (m at this domain) with a little feedback as to why you made your decision. It’ll help us make WordPress even better in the future.