WordPress.org

It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes. We’re breaking the tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians to congratulate Ryan Boren on his new son (and first WP baby) Ronan.

What’s new? We have about 50 or so bugfixes, which you can review on our dev tracker here, mostly minor bug fixes around feeds, custom fields, and internationalization. If you’d like a nitty-gritty view, check out Mark’s blog post on the changes.

Like every release this was the result of a lot of people in the WordPress community, and I’d like to thank all our contributors and testers including Mustlive, Peter Westwood, and Robert Deaton. This is also the first release handled by our new 2.0 maintainer, Mark Jaquith. He joins myself and Ryan with commit access and is “committed” to keeping the 2.0 base stable as we head into the exciting new 2.1 world. Congrats to Mark

The WordPress family has been really starting to grow lately. I wanted to let you guys know about two big releases: WordPress Multi-user 1.0 and bbPress 0.72.

WordPress MU is an official branch of WordPress that is designed for managing and hosting thousands of blogs instead of just one. It’s the software that powers WordPress.com, for example. MU has been in heavy development for about a year now, and we’ve finally polished it up to a place where we feel like it’s ready for public consumption. Since setup is a bit more complex than the 5-minute install of regular WordPress, MU is best suited for a more server-savvy audience. You can download it on the WordPress MU site.

Second I wanted to introduce an old friend you are all probably familiar with from our support forums, bbPress. bbPress is forum software with the WordPress touch, and developed by the same folks. It has some pretty cool features, such as tagging, RSS feeds, Akismet spam protection, AJAX interaction, but the team focused the most on creating something fast and light. bbPress can power a forum with hundreds of thousands of posts with just a fraction of the load as WordPress. (If we could re-write WP from scratch, it would be a lot like bbPress.) What is probably most compelling for WordPress users, though, is that bbPress supports complete user and login integration with WP.

bbPress is not quite 1.0 yet, some of you may recognize the 0.72 version number from the early days of WordPress, but if you’re searching for a little something fresh in forum software, try downloading bbPress and giving it a go.