WordPress.org

At various events throughout 2006, like SxSW and WordCamp we had t-shirts and each time we got a ton of requests for people who weren’t there to be able to buy them. Well, now you can. We have a limited supply of some of our shirts from this year available to order online.

You can’t tell from the pictures, but the black shirts have a larger W logo and make you feel a bit like Superman. The grey WordCamp shirts have the logo a bit smaller, and are a bit reminiscent of Daring Fireball. Both look good with jeans.

Part of the idea is once we print a style, we never do it again, so each shirt will be representative of a certain time in WordPress history. Since these are the very first, they make a great gift for yourself or that special blogging geek in you life. Check out the store.

If you have any pictures of yourself in a WordPress shirt on Flickr, be sure to tag them wordpressshirt to join the fun.

Update: We’re very sorry, but Goodstorm only ships to the US. If you’d like that to change, send Goodstorm some feedback.

Guest article by Aaron Brazell

WordPress 2.1 is almost here and you know what that means for developers. It’s time to pull out those old plugins you’ve had stashed, blow off the dust and start applying some spit and polish and make sure it will last longer than Grandma’s Ham and Bean soup that has been sitting in the refrigerator for weeks.

Many of the big changes in WordPress 2.1 are MySQL related so grab a pen and paper (or open Notepad) and start taking notes.

• The $table* variables have all been eliminated. They have not been deprecated as doing so would mean that the variables are still present but developers are no longer encouraged to use them. In this case, they have been removed from the core. When you’re developing plugins that contain SQL statements, ensure you globalize $wpdb, and call tables using $wpdb->posts, $wpdb->post2cat, etc. Likewise, the former $table_prefix variable that developers could globalize before to find the MySQL table prefix defined in wp-config.php has also been deprecated in favor of $wpdb->prefix.
• Developers using the former linkcategories table should be aware that link categories are now part of categories. They are simply given another category ID and are not maintained separate from post categories.
• The posts table now has a column of post_type that should help developers distinguish between posts and pages.
• Future posts now gain the post_status of ‘future’ which eliminates the use of NOW() in all queries in the core. Plugin developers should follow suit.

WordPress 2.1 is nearing the time when the codebase will be released for testing, but it’s not too early to get those plugins and themes tweaked for the release. There is a Codex page where plugin compatibility is being tracked as well.

Editor’s note: If you stick to the WP APIs as much as possible you won’t run into plugin upgrade issues like this.