op111.net » ellak

Flashing your BIOS from Linux with flashrom

demetris — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:32:23 +0000

Sometimes in Linux things are easier than you think. I needed to upgrade the BIOS of a Linux machine and I was not optimistic. On top of the usual issue—what to do in Linux with the Windows executables that motherboard manufacturers provide—, the machine did not have a CD-ROM drive or a floppy drive.

But then we have search engines. A quick search led me to a promising howto by Uwe Hermann. There I learned about flashrom.

flashrom, to quote its man page,

is a utility for detecting, reading, writing, verifying and erasing flash chips. It’s often used to flash BIOS/EFI/coreboot/firmware images in-system using a supported mainboard, but it also supports flashing of network cards (NICs), SATA controller cards, and other external devices which can program flash chips.

It supports a wide range of DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40, and TSOP48 chips, which use various protocols such as LPC, FWH, parallel flash, or SPI.

Intriguing stuff, especially the “in-system” bit. More so for someone lazy like me. I had to try it!

Here is what it took...

The latest BIOS update I had downloaded from the manufacturer’s website was a self-extracting Windows executable. I extracted it manually with 7zr:

$ 7zr e motherboard-bios-ga-k8vt800(rev1.x)-f13.exe

The extraction revealed three files: One EXE and one BAT (which are not needed in Linux) and the BIOS image I needed for the operation: k8vt800.f13.

Next I installed flashrom using the package manager of the system:

$ sudo apt-get install flashrom

And I run flashrom to see what it knew about my hardware:

$ sudo flashrom

It seemed to recognize everything correctly. So, I proceeded to the next step, making a backup copy of the current BIOS image:

$ sudo flashrom --read bios.bak

Lastly, I flashed the BIOS with the image from the motherboard manufacturer:

$ sudo flashrom --write k8vt800.f13

The last step, writing and verifying the new image, took a few seconds and was completed successfully.

I was left with a big smile and with admiration and gratitude for the people who make flashrom.

Learn more about flashrom: flashrom.org

WARNING. An unsuccessful flashing operation with flashrom or with any other flashing method can leave your system inoperable. Don’t try this in a critical system unless you know what you are doing!

Thank you for reading.

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WordPress 3.1: What’s new

demetris — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 21:33:08 +0000

UPDATE 2011-02-23. WordPress 3.1 was released today! Official Announcement.

The first release candidate of WordPress 3.1 came out in 25 December 2010, and the final release is now close.

Coming 6 months after 3.0, a version that brought many major changes, including the merge with WordPress MU, version 3.1 is not as ambitious in scope. One reason for this is that development time in this cycle was divided between WordPress itself and the official Wordpress site, WordPress.org, which received several updates and improvements.

Even so, WordPress 3.1 represents a large amount of work and brings hundreds of fixes and improvements, large and small, as well as a considerable number of additions, three among which stand out: AJAX-powered lists in all administration areas, advanced taxonomy queries and meta queries, and a new Network Admin area (for multi-site installations).

CONTENTS

Known issues and backwards compatibility
Highlights
Developers
Tickets
Changes
Epilogue
This document

1. Known issues and backwards compatibility

Nothing frightening yet.

Backwards compatibility is very good. If it is any indication, all of the about 20 plugins used in this site work fine with WordPress 3.1.

2. Highlights

2.1. Administration bar

The Admin Bar is the most obvious new feature in WordPress 3.1. It appears at the top of the page when you are logged in and displays links to commonly accessed areas of the dashboard as well as notifications for new comments and for available updates.

The new administration bar in a single-site and in a multi-site setup

Its design and layout are well considered and it works well. The parts of it that I have found most useful up to now are the Edit Page / Edit Post links and the Updates notifications (the Updates item appears only when there are updates available.)

In a single-site installation the Admin Bar appears only on the front-end. In a multi-site installation it appears on the front-end and on the the dashboard. These are the default settings, which you can change at your profile page. If you don’t care at all for the new Admin Bar, you can also disable it, again from your profile page.

DEV. The Admin Bar is extensible, which means that plugins and themes can modify it to add or remove items. One plugin that already does this is the Debug Bar, which adds an extra item to display useful debugging information:

The Debug Bar plugin is available from the official repository. See westi’s introduction for more:

Debug Bar by the WordPress team
Introducing Debug Bar by Peter Westwood

2.2. AJAX techniques for better list browsing

UPDATE 2011-01-24. The AJAX infrastucture was removed in RC3 and will not be in the final release of WordPress 3.1. There was not enough time to make it work well enough and to make it work in a way that was backwards compatible. The sortable columns were retained and are now the major new improvement in list browsing.

Practically, the use of AJAX techniques means that browsing dashboard lists, e.g. the list of all your posts or the list of all comments, is now faster, more responsive, and also that all dashboard lists are now sortable by column. See the screenshot for a quick explanation:

This was a large undertaking and required a lot of new code, probably more than any other new feature in this version. As a result, a few small things here and there may not work as well as they should yet, and there are a few improvements left to be made. Even so, I find that the ajaxification of the dashboard lists is the most significant improvement WordPress 3.1 brings to its users.

2.3. Internal linking

If you link often to existing content in your site, this is a new feature you will appreciate.

The link dialog of the visual editor now has an extra area that lets you make an internal link with one click. It presents a list of all your published posts and pages in reverse chronological order (latest on top) and it can also filter the list of posts and pages based on what you type in the search box:

Internal linking in WordPress 3.1

Please note that Internal Linking is implemented as extension of the visual editor, which means that it is not available on the HTML view or when the visual editor is disabled. If you want easy internal linking in those cases, you can try the Link to Post plugin, which also works in WordPress 3.0:

Link to Post

A THOUGHT. I am not certain that Internal Linking needed to be implemented as a core feature. Maybe it would be better to implement it as a stand-alone extension/plugin for the visual editor. Why? Because the more features WordPress core gets, the more difficult it becomes to maintain.

2.4. Post formats

“Post formats” is a new term in WordPress but the concept and the need are old: How to present all posts of a certain type in a distinct style and layout? For example, how to style all “asides” differently from other posts?

This was already possible in WordPress and it has been implemented in various ways by WordPress themes. The most common approach was to put special posts in a special category and then apply a special style to posts of that category. K2, for instance, has been doing that for as long as I remember, since 2005 or 2006: It offers an option to style all posts of a particular category as “asides”.

Now, what the new “post formats” of WordPress 3.1 aim to do is promote a standard implementation of this concept that is easier for users, easier for developers, and also consistent and portable between themes and between languages.

If your theme supports posts formats, you can now see them and can select one when you write a post. WordPress then saves your selection along with the rest of the post metainformation (post title, post excerpt, etc.). If you later switch to another theme that supports your selected format, then your posts of that format will continue to be displayed in a special way. If you later switch to a theme that does not support post formats, then, simply, your posts of that format will have no special style.

The post formats that themes can support using the new built-in capability are ten:

Standard
Aside
Audio
Chat
Gallery
Image
Link
Quote
Status
Video

(Since the aim was portability and standardization, custom formats beyond these ten are not supported by the WordPress core.)

DEV. For examples of implementation, see codex.wordpress.org/Post_Formats

2.5. Network admin

The Network Admin is a new area introduced to make the administration of multisite setups easier. It is accessible only to network administrators —or “super admins”, as they are often called— and it is meant specifically and exclusively for network administartion tasks, so that network administration stays out of the way of publishing and site management and so that publishing and site management stay out of the way of network administration.

Network Admin replaces the Super Admin menu of WordPress 3.0. (WordPress 3.0 was the version when WordPress MU was merged into WordPress.)

Network Admin screens in WordPress 3.1

2.6. More

Index/Archive pages for custom post types. Something missing from custom post types in WordPress 3.0 was arhive pages. WordPress 3.1 brings archive pages to custom post types too. So, for example, if you have a custom post type Recipes with slug recipes, you can also have an arhive of all your recipes at example.com/recipes.

Exporter/Importer overhaul. The WordPress Exporter and the WordPress Importer were rewritten, to improve performance, add new functionality and address long-standing bugs and annoyances. This was a large undertaking and, it seems, a successful one. Both the new exporter and the new importer work very well and are very fast!

More metaboxes hidden by default on edit screens. In new installations most metaboxes on edit screens are now hidden by default, while the default height of the editor was increased. (You can always reveal or hide the metaboxes you want by clicking on the Screen Options tab.)

Password reset improvements. The process for resetting a lost password is now better. If you are curious to check it out, click on the Lost your password? link on a login screen and follow the instructions.

Search for installed themes. The Themes screen now has a search feature that lets you search among install themes by name and by features. This will be more useful in multisite setups that offer a large variety of themes to their users.

Visual editor improvements. TinyMCE, the base of WordPress visual editor, has been updated to its latest version (3.3) which brings lots of improvements and fixes.

3. Highlights for developers

3.1. Compatibility

Backwards compatibility is in general very good. If you are doing things the right way, using the recommended WordPress APIs where appropriate, you should not see things break. That’s the idea anyway! :-)

Areas that may need attention are highlighted in a series of posts at the WordPress Development Blog:

wpdevel.wordpress.com/tag/31compat

Independently of compatibility issues, WP Devel posts are always good reading if you develop for WordPress. Here is a selection from the 3.1 development cycle, in chronological order:

3.2. Advanced taxonomy queries

This is one of the most interesting new capabilities in WordPress 3.1 for developers as well as for users. Now, for the first time, you can get posts by combining individual taxonomy queries in several ways — for example, you can get all posts that have a specific tag but not another specific tag and that are found in a specific category.

Usage is simple. Let’s say that I want to get all op111.net posts in the category wordpress that are tagged lang-el. (That is, all posts from the category WordPress that are written in Greek.) The code is:

$my_query['tax_query'] = array(
    array(
        'taxonomy'  => 'category',
        'field'     => 'slug',
        'terms'     => array('wordpress'),
    ),
    array(
        'taxonomy'  => 'post_tag',
        'field'     => 'slug',
        'terms'     => array('lang-el'),
    ),
);

query_posts($my_query);

Conveniently, there is also a shorthand syntax:

query_posts(array(
    'category_name' => 'wordpress',
    'tag' => 'lang-el',
));

It’s also possible to define the relation between the individual queries, which can be either AND or OR (default is AND). And the operator too, which can be either IN or NOT IN (default is IN).

So, if I wanted to get all posts from the category wordpress that are not tagged lang-el, I would use:

$my_query['tax_query'] = array(
    array(
        'taxonomy'  => 'category',
        'field'     => 'slug',
        'terms'     => array('wordpress'),
    ),
    array(
        'operator'  => 'NOT IN'
        'taxonomy'  => 'post_tag',
        'field'     => 'slug',
        'terms'     => array('lang-el'),
    ),
);

query_posts($my_query);

And so on and so forth; the possibilities are many. The usual suspect Otto has written a detailed article:

WordPress 3.1: Advanced Taxonomy Queries » Otto on WordPress

Meta queries come with similar improvements in WordPress 3.1. You can now query posts based on advanced combinations of custom fields. scribu, who did most of the work on the new advanced queries, has a quick explanation on his site:

Advanced Metadata Queries | scribu

3.3. Improved user queries

The new get_users() function, which wraps the also new WP_User_Query class, simplifies user queries a lot. It accepts arguments as an array and returns a list of users based on the defined criteria.

The arguments it accepts are:

blog_id
count_total
exclude
fields
include
meta_compare
meta_key
meta_value
number
offset
order
orderby
role
search
who

get_users() is not yet documented at the Codex but you can get an idea of what it can do and how to use it by looking at WP_User_Query, the class it uses:

core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/wp-includes/user.php

4. Selected tickets

t5919. Password reset improvements
t10187. wp_redirect and canonical redirect do not work as expected on IIS
t11420. Easy internal linking from new content
t12257. wpdb scales badly due to unnecessary copies of all query results
t12891. Advanced multi-taxonomy queries
t13324. Limit auto-generated passwords to alphanumeric chars
t13818. Index/Archive pages for custom post types
t14062. Some Location headers use relative URLs
t14122. Custom capabilities broken on custom post types
t14424. Eliminate dynamic function definitions, i.e. create_function()
t14435. Network admin
t14494. Move is_*() functionality (AKA conditional tags) into the WP_Query class
- t14729. Fatal errors after r15531 when conditional tags are used too early
t14508. Always require wp-db.php
t14579. Ajaxify list-type screens in dashboard
- t16262. Remove AJAX and extensibility from list tables
t14642. Support for Facebook’s HipHop
t14696. Personal dashboard
t14772. Administration bar
t14820. Allow WP XML-RPC library to be extended
t14897. Network admin screen for enabling/disabling/upgrading themes
t15170. Network admin pages don’t scale
t15824. Introduce _doing_it_wrong() to mark incorrect use of functions

5. Selected changesets

This part offers a selection out of the total of changes that went into WordPress 3.1. Links starting with r (e.g., r12345) point to changesets. Links starting with t (e.g., t12345) point to tickets.

5.1. New functionality

r15481. Network Admin, first pass. See t14435. — Multisite
r15491. Ajaxify list-type screens in dashboard. See t14579. — REVERTED! See t16262.
r15613. Clean up taxonomy queries in WP_Query. See t12891. — Work on advanced taxonomy queries starts here.
r15671. Admin bar, first pass. See t14772.
r15705, r16381. Hierarchical taxonomy URLs. See t12659.
r15777. Post formats, take one. See t14746.
- r16705. Index pages for post formats. First pass. See t15378.
r15803. Custom post type archives. See t13818.
r15831, r15832, r15848. Save old slug for all published post types. Brings old-slug redirection to Pages and CPTs. See t15140.
r15940. Internal linking, first pass. See t11420.
r15996. Add Check Again button and timestamp to update-core. See t14764.
r16003. Add Sticky filter on edit posts screen. See t8466.
r16113. Network Admin screen for managing themes, first pass. See t14897. — Multisite
r16180. Allow tag cloud using multiple taxonomies. See t15313.
r16857. Option for retro gravatar. See t15759.

5.2. Bug fixes

r15328. Fix is_site_admin() when passing a username. See t14046. — 3.0 also
r15346. Use WP_PLUGIN_DIR. See t14070. — 3.0 also
r15377. More judicious correction of capital P to avoid bungling reasonable URLs. See t13971.
r15437. Hex octets are case-insensitive. Don’t 301 if only case differs. See t14292. — 3.0 also
r15473. “login”, “setup”, “backup” are not verbs.
r15554. Make smilies links SSL-aware. See t14360.
r15584. In current page highlighting logic apply untrailingslashit() to everything so that slash additions or omissions still match. See t14208.
r15614. Don’t show default password nag on profile screen. See t14861.
r15659. Only show Password Strength Meter when JavaScript is available. See t14943.
r15665. Add missing Moderate Comment title to comment.php. See t14139.
r15670. Fix comma splice in sample About page.
r15707. Fix canonical redirection for permalinks containing %category% with nested categories and paging. See t13471. — 3.0 also
r15709. Fix nav menu box search. See t14335.
r15877. Push capital P filter back behind wpautop, to catch Wordpress after opening HTML tag.
r15918. Fix media dialog keypress handling. See t14394.
r15960. Attempt at fix for URL encoding issues with UTF-8 chars. See t10249.
r15966. Fix custom background selector for IE7 in Appearance › Background. See t14152.
r16111, r16279, r16948. Also capture ! (exclamation mark) when making URL clickable. See t14993.
r16178, r16179. Don’t assign subscriber role if user already has role for blog. See t15316.
r16230. Remove nofollow on comment reply links. See t10550. — SEO improvement
r16444. When inserting image via oEmbed, wrap in link pointing to original location. See t14945.
r16449. Expose 1-column option in gallery settings. See t14836.
r16542, r16543, r16544. Cast term_id to integer for queried_object_id. See t14590.
r16624. Prepare properly. — 3.0 also
r16637. Drop pingback/trackback blogroll whitelisting. (Easy to abuse.) See t13887. — 3.0 also
r16647, r16648. Fix bulk comment keyboard shortcuts. See t15571.
r16663. Allow long plugin upgrade notices to wrap. See t14068.
r16814. Keep Dashboard RSS widgets in same place when configuring. See t14785.
r16846. Make get_header_image() SSL-aware. See t14835.
r16870. Don’t clear used username in login form. See t14031.
r16903. Use HTTPS for preview links if is_ssl(). See t13328.
r17061. Fix guid generation for page auto drafts. See t15041.
r17284. Show author dropdown in quick edit even when there is only one contributor-or-higher user and the post belongs to someone who no longer has contributor-or-higher access. See t14420.
r17260. Disallow self-reference on RSS widget save, which would DoS a site. Checking home/siteurl should cover vast majority of cases. See t8910.

5.3. Modifications, enhancements, improvements

r15445. Set default posts per page to 20. See t14342. — 3.0 also
r15457. Update WordPress blog URL from wordpress.org/development to wordpress.org/news.
r15469. Only employ maintenance_mode() on MS or if updated plugin/theme is active. See t14393.
r15553. Link directly to comment in email notification. See t12797.
r15555, r15976. Hide more meta boxes by default in edit screens. See t14212.
- r17294. Hide the many extraneous meta boxes for pages by default too. See t14212.
r15588. Add second Save button for custom nav menus at bottom. See t14265.
r15687. Allow search in archive pages. See t14831.
r15697. Preserve search terms on plugin management screens during actions. See t14905. — 3.0 also
r15722. Use separate AJAX spinners for Save Draft and Publish buttons. See t14582.
r15757. Update via AJAX the sample output of custom date/times on Options › General. See t12636.
r15710. Improve password reset process. Let user define new password. See t5919.
r15682. Remove set-cookie redirection workaround for IIS 3/4/5. See r2436, t10187.
r15961, r16652. Importer and exporter overhaul. See t15197.
- EXPORTER
  - Add author information
  - Greater usage of slug identifiers
  - Don’t export auto-drafts, spam comments, or edit lock/last meta keys
  - Inline documentation improvements
  - Bump WXR version to 1.1, but remain back compat in importer
- IMPORTER (plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/304249)
  - Use XML parser where available (SimpleXML, XML Parser)
  - Proper support for navigation menus
  - Many bug fixes, specifically improvements to category and custom taxonomy handling
  - Better author/user mapping
r16427. Make clear we are installing the American English version, so that message makes sense in non-American English environments. See t14467.
r15946. Disable dropdown when Latest posts is selected on Settings › Reading. See t15205.
r16145. Blue theme refresh, first pass. See t15207.
r16304. Don’t notify author when they posted or moderated the comment. See t12774.
r16223. Send moderation emails to post author: An interim solution of emailing the post author as well as the admin if author has proper capabilities. Ideally these will become individual options. See t6286.
r16284. Restrict auto-generated passwords to alphanumeric characters (so that double click selects whole password). See t13324.
r16285. Enclose password reset link in <> to protect it in some email clients when wrapped. See t14140.
r16651. Don’t nag to Change Permalinks if permalink structure is defined. See t13918.
r16696, r16701, r16702, r16703. Standardize on “Update” for Update/Upgrade messages. See t14107, t15656.
r16821. Include username in incorrect password message. See t14575.
r17225. More room for your content! Increase default post edit rows as the meta boxes are now all hidden by default. See t14212.
r17288. Remove TinyMCE media plugin. See t14647.
r17301. WordPress contains libraries only available under the GPL v2 or later. No one cares about the GPL v1 anymore. We are now specifically saying that WordPress is available under the GPL version 2 or (at your option) any later version. This was discussed with the entire core team.

5.4. Optimization

r15287. In install_popular_tags() use site transient rather than own caching. See t13108.
r15546, r16034, r16035, r16312, r16313, r16317. Don’t use create_function(). See t14424, t14579.
r15559. Do not run kses on display filters for front page views. See t14758.
r15585. More efficient calendar queries. See t8351.
r15608. More efficient is_super_admin(). Don’t call new WP_User on current user. See t14842.
r15636, r16300. Faster is_serialized() with strpbrk(). See t14429.
r15641. Don’t fetch theme_roots transient on every page load. Avoid it altogether if there is only one theme dir. See t14911.
- r16424. Register the default theme dir in wp-settings.php so that it is registered even when get_themes() doesn’t run. Fix counting of theme dirs. Add option to get_raw_theme_root() to disregard the current theme root cache. See t14911.
r15660. get_boundary_post(). Sort by post_date, not ID. See t14035.
r15700. update_post_caches(). Cache terms under more scenarios. See t15026.
r15701. get_boundary_post(). Don’t load taxonomy and postmeta cache. See t15028, t14796. — Reduces queries for rel nav links.
r15816. Improve regex performance in wptexturize(). See t15093.
r15833. Cache invalidation for get_blogs_of_user(). See t14379.
- r16225. Prime blogs of user cache from old cache to avoid mass DB requests on upgrade. See t14379.
r15919. Do not set role if it is the same. See t14708.
r15932. Don’t make redundant str_replace() calls in link-template.
r15949. Avoid extra conditional in subdirectory rewrite rules. See t15083.
r16029. Remove unnecessary wp_cache_delete() calls. See t14080.
r16096, r16104, r16105. Optimize menu item creation. See t14415.
r16204. post_class(). Skip category/tag queries if post type doesn’t support them. See t15322.
r16206. get_page_by_path(). Eliminate some queries by consulting cache. See t11373.
r16437. Use wp_cache_add() instead of wp_cache_set() in update_meta_cache(). See t15452.
r16596. Meta data caching improvements. See t15545.
r16958. Add theme_mods option if is_admin. See t14828.
r16974. Fetch only the required field in wp_dropdown_users(). See t14572.

5.5. Other

r15275. Development of WordPress 3.1 starts.
r15356. Don’t use deprecated function. Blacklist braces. — safecss_filter_attr()
r15363. Restore trackback_rdf(). Reverts r13991. See t11139. — 3.0 also
r15371. Pass feed type from the_content_feed() to get_the_content_feed(). See t14214.
r15450. Make posts per page filters consistent and backwards compatible. See t14135. — 3.0 also
r15471. More curses on PHP 5.0.5. (Return by reference from internal functions causes fatal error.) See t13757, t14160. — 3.0 also
r15521. Some escaping. — Mentioned for instructive value
r15531. is_*() (conditional tags) WP_Query methods. See t14494.
r15533. We cannot say that WordPress as a whole is GPLv2 (i.e. “GPLv2 only”). Go back to just “GPL”. Reverts r13516. — 3.0 also
r15537. Remove WP_USE_MULTIPLE_DB. Introduce init_charset() and set_charset(). See t14672.
r15549. r15563. Don’t use id global anymore. Use get_the_ID(). See t11624.
r15550. Update last_changed when cleaning comment cache. See t14713.
r15560. Add a note about REMOTE_ADDR behind proxies.
r15582. Don’t hardcode pagination base (page). See t12507.
r15583. Don’t cache terms indefinitely. Use TTL of one day. See t11431.
r15591. Only run update checks on main site. See t14554.
r15596. Introduce edit_comment meta cap. See t14520.
r15638. Always include wp-db.php. Prevents a conditional include and allows database dropins to cleanly extend the wpdb class. Move require_wp_db() to load.php for consistency with bootloader helpers. See t14508.
r15643. Make login CSS more flexible. See t7763.
r15672. Do thorough resets in init() and init_query_flags(). See t14976.
r15720. Account for Twenty Ten in theme name collisions and properly fall back to it in get_current_theme(). See t15719.
r15736. Have theme mods rely on theme slug instead of theme name. See t15048.
r15749. Don’t generate incorrect content types when files are requested with query strings. See t14450.
r15770. Make parse_request() set empty variables. See t10710.
r15772. Make it explicit that you can set fallback_cb to FALSE in wp_nav_menu().
r15798. Don’t show taxonomy term’s descendants in parent selector. See t14663.
- r15806. Prevent post and term hierarchy loops. See t14662.
r15808. Display mysql_connect errors when WP_DEBUG is enabled. Always die if we can't connect to the database; no point in going any futher. See t14654.
r15811. Require plugin.php earlier so all pluggables can get at it. See t15042.
r15818. nav_menu and post_format taxonomies should not be public. See t15107.
r15836. Allow flagging blog as mature via URL. Move some actions into update_blog_status(). See t14385.
r15872. Schedule update checks from an init hook. See t15148.
r15890. Rough first pass on map_meta_cap for custom post types. See t14122. See Changes to meta capability handling in 3.1.
r15920. Default send to editor to true if the post parent is empty. See t14133.
r15948. Idempotence for sanitize_user(). Make sanitize_key() match its phpDoc. See t15198.
r15971. Fix infinite recursion caused by malformed URLs. See t14655.
r15973. Refactor wp_get_recent_posts() to use get_posts().
r15984. Specify feed type in the_category_rss() call. See t14451.
r16007. Use the API to build site URLs.
r16009. Move registration.php functions to user.php. Deprecate registration.php; everything is now included by default. See t13761.
r16012. Don’t call activation hooks when upgrading. See t14915.
r16028. Add class to “Your comment is awaiting moderation” in the comment walker and in Twenty Ten’s callback. See t15206.
r16030. Use correct variable in edit_bookmark_link(). See t14141.
r16068. Don’t pass deprecated argument in discover_pingback_server_uri().
r16093. Move an array cast further down the stack in wp_get_nocache_headers(). See t13965.
r16095. Add menu-item-object-$object class for custom menus. See t14053.
r16135. Die if user doesn’t have caps for post type. See t15259.
r16136, r16415. Admin CSS cleanup. See t14770.
r16197. Add Post Format support to Twenty Ten (Aside and Gallery). See t14746.
r16207. Don’t anchor regex. Fix for sanitize_email(). See t14628.
r16215, r16552. More precise regex in get_file_data(). See t15193.
r16340. Use square brackets instead of braces for string access. See t13900.
r16365. Improve hook readability via braces. See t15422.
r16392. Fallback to only RTL attributes in wp_die() HTML tag if it’s very early in the execution. See t6132.
r16401. Use user_trailingslashit() in get_author_posts_url(). See t15441.
r16539. Escape URL in wp_link_pages(). See t14271.
r16564. Updated WebPI parameters.xml file. — IIS branch
r16566. Let SimplePie do more of the date handling for us.
r16585. Tighter match for the ACL. — IIS branch
r16587. Things go bump in the night. — WordPress 3.1 Beta 1
r16666. Don’t show permalink box in edit screen if post type is not publicly queryable. See t14321.
r16667. Remove archaic reference return in get_children(). See t12372.
r16670. Throw WP_Error if post_type passed to register_post_type() is too long. See t13709. — 3.0 also
r16688. Include parent theme CSS before child’s in add_editor_style(). See t14430.
r16691. Clean cache when deleting term. See t15651.
r16694. Add class to Tag Cloud widget DIV. See t12602.
r16728. Unescape ampersands before making oEmbed request. See t14514, t11311.
r16738. Get rid of niggling hardcoded blogs.dir path. See t15383.
r16742. Highlight home page Custom Nav Menu item even when extra query args are present in the URL (only if all other highlights fail). See t13994.
r16752. Add jquery-ui-sortable dependency to nav-menu. See t15622.
r16783. Fix background colors for Select Files upload buttons. See t8545.
r16797. Enable canonical redirections for permalink-suporting IIS. See t10187.
r16808. Remove stripslashes() from get_blog_option(). No longer needed. See t12560.
r16812. Fix error display in media form. See t13810.
r16826. Link to unobfuscated JavaScript. (To comply with GPL.) See t15262.
r16864. wp-caption-text class for the gallery shortcode caption. See t14411.
r16872, r16877, r16878. Check if WP_Query has returned any posts before proceeding. See t15771.
r16906. Return correct HTTP status code (410) for archived, deleted, and spam sites. See t15799.
r16920. Fix canonical paged/feed redirects. See t14288.
r16922. Remove internal ceilings from Recent Comments and Recent Posts widgets, and from dashboard widgets. See t14543.
r16932. 3.1 Beta 2.
r16939. _doing_it_wrong(), first pass. New function to display notifications for incorrect use of functions. See t15824.
r17068. Prevent fatal error if conditional tag is called before $wp_query is set. See t14729.
r17102. Translations in title attributes require esc_attr(). — Mentioned for instructive value
r17085. Don’t check upload space site option if option is disabled. See t13601. — Multisite
r17148. Happy holidays :D — WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate 1
r17171. Don’t be case sensitive to attribute names. Handle padded entities when checking for bad protocols. Normalize entities before checking for bad protocols in esc_url(). — 3.0 also — Security
r17322. Remove AJAX from list tables, first pass. See t16262.
r17355. WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate 3.

5.6. Third-party libraries

r15612. Incutio XML-RPC Library from 1.7 beta to 1.7.4. See t14703.
r15683, r16950. TinyMCE from 3.2.7 to 3.3.9.3. See t15111.
r15711, r15738, r16165, r16863, r17304, r17346. jQuery UI from 1.7.3 to 1.8.9. See t12863, t15303, t15766, t16234, t16331.
r15821, r15991, r16186, r16318. jQuery from 1.4.2 to 1.4.4. See t15135, t15227.
r16305. Farbtastic from v1.2 to v1.3u. See t14707.

5.7. XML-RPC

r16064. r16065. WP_HTTP_IXR_Client. Introduce and use in core. Extends IXR_Client and switches it to using the WordPress HTTP API instead of fsockopen(). See t10588.
r16256. Support optional number of posts in the following XML-RPC API calls:
- blogger.getRecentPosts
- metaWeblog.getRecentPosts
- mt.getRecentPostTitles
r16484. Expose post format details in XML-RPC. See t15405.
- New method: wp.getPostFormats
- New field in methods dealing with posts: wp_post_format
r16809. Use is_callable() instead of method_exists(). See t14933.
r16824. Work around some notices for unset variable in xmlrpc.php. See t10665.
r15975. 4th argument of wp.getOptions is optional. Don’t notice if it is absent.
r15980. Expose the media options over XML-RPC. Fixes t15153.
r16016. First pass at 'wp.getMediaItem' and 'wp.getMediaLibrary'. See t15151.
r16046. phpDoc and a bug fix for the new media XMLRPC functions. See t15151.
r16508. Ensure that we return post IDs as strings to honour API defintions. See t15517.
r16572. Cast to string so we return the correct datatype. See t15517.

5.8. Functions/Classes

NEW FUNCTIONS AND CLASSES

r15491. WP_User_Query. The new WordPress user query class. See t14579.
r15723. WP_Comment_Query. WordPress Comment Query class.
r16849. WP_Tax_Query. Containter class for advanced taxonomy queries. See t15752.

r15467. unregister_nav_menu(). See t14001. — 3.0 also
r15481. is_network_admin(). See t14435.
r15491. get_users(). Retrieves users matching criteria. Uses WP_User_Query. See t14579.
r15558. is_blog_admin(). See t14763.
r15598. single_term_title(). Introduced and used in single_cat_title(), single_tag_title(). See t14161.
r15574. wp_array_slice_assoc(). Given list of keys, extracts slice of array. See t14572.
r15601. wp_dequeue_script(), wp_dequeue_style(). See t14815.
r15631. get_ancestors(). See t12443.
r15677. has_term(), has_category(). See t12526.
r15686. wp_list_filter(), wp_list_pluck(). See t15016.
r15746. add_screen_option(). Registers and configures admin screen option. See t14696.
r15746. get_current_screen(). Gets current screen object (in dashboard). See t14696.
r15746. is_user_admin(). See t14696.
r15753. remove_menu_page(), remove_submenu_page(). See t12718.
r15777. get_post_format(). Retrieves format of post.
r15777. set_post_format(). Assigns format to post.
r15778. has_post_format(). See t14746.
r15792, r15800, r15801. edit_term_link(), get_edit_term_link(), get_term_url(). See t9702.
r15806. wp_get_post_parent_id().
r15806. wp_get_term_taxonomy_parent_id()
r15810, r16061, r16097, r16362. submit_button(), get_submit_button(). New template functions. See t15064. See core for examples of usage.
r15819. get_post_type_archive_feed_link(). Retrieves permalink for post type archive feed.
r15819. get_post_type_archive_link(). Retrieves permalink for post type archive.
r15819. is_post_type_archive().
r15819, r16211. post_type_archive_title(). Displays/Retrieves title for post type archive. See t13818.
r15929. sanitize_title_for_query(). See t9591.
- r15930. remove_accents(): Nordic characters fixes. See t4739, t9591.
- r15931. Also convert uppercase letters in Latin Extended-B. See t9591.
r16050. get_current_blog_id(). See t15233.
r16073, r16075. translate_nooped_plural(). See t13996.
- _n_noop() and _nx_noop() now return associative arrays for greater clarity
- translate_nooped_plural() takes one such associative array and translates it
- works on both the result from _n_noop() and from _nx_noop()
- retains backwards compatiblity for the few plugins using _n_noop()
r16083. get_dashboard_url(), get_edit_profile_url(). Determine appropriate dashboard for user based on user’s blogs and current blog. See t14696, t14772.
r16091, r16114, r16115. get_queried_object(), get_queried_object_id(). Wrappers for $wp_query->get_queried_object() and $wp_query->get_queried_object_id(). Introduced and applied in core.
r16154. wp_basename(). i18n-friendly basename() (for media handling, inter alia). See t11887.
r16209. user_can(). Whether user has capability or role. See t14602.
r16388. set_post_thumbnail(). See t15192.
r16431. esc_textarea(). Escaping for textarea input. Applied in core where appropriate. See t15454.
r16674. remove_custom_image_header(). See t14903.
r16705. get_post_format_link().
r16705. get_post_format_slugs().
r16720. remove_custom_background(). See t14903.
r16721. remove_editor_styles(). See t14903.
r16764. can_edit_site(). To replace inline checks on whether site_id is for current network. See t15716.

IMPROVED/MODIFIED FUNCTIONS AND CLASSES

r15544. wp_nav_menu().
- Make menus manipulation easier for plugin developers.
- Add wp_nav_menu_objects filter, which gets a sorted list of all menu node objects in the currently rendered menu.
- Add current, current_item_ancestor and current_item_parent boolean member variables to each menu node object, which are true when the item has the current-menu-item, current-menu-ancestor or current-menu-parent CSS class respectively.
r15564. wp_insert_post(). Now requires argument. See t14783.
r15586. get_term_link(). Second (taxonomy) parameter now optional if passing term object as first arg (which has the taxonomy in it). See t13081.
r15587. wp_list_pages(). Supports custom post type links. See t14177.
r15589. get_posts(). caller_get_posts renamed to ignore_sticky_posts. See t14624.
r15598, r15599. single_cat_title(), single_tag_title(), wp_title(). Cleaned up. See t14161.
r15620. wp_list_authors(). New number, orderby and order args. See t10329.
r15635. sanitize_key(). Simplified and used in more places. See t14910.
r15771. locate_template(). Now accepts string as first parameter. See t15061.
r15982. WP_Query. New fields query variable. See t14777.
r15626, r15627. category__in(), tag__in() etc. Input does not have to be array. See t14892, t14389.
r15661. screen_icon(). New CSS class for post type. See t14959.
r15690. wp_delete_category(). Now wraps wp_delete_term(). See t15008.
r15828. remove_theme_support(). Now allows disabling custom header uploads. See t14837.
r15844. register_post_type(). New show_in_menu arg: Allows post types to be a submenu, accepts boolean and also a parent base. See t14145.
r15855. the_terms(). id arg now optional. See t15160.
r15856. body_class(). New classes for custom taxonomies/terms. See t15017.
r15937. is_archive(). post_type params removed. Use is_post_type_archive() for full context. See t13818.
r15968. is_multisite(). Also looks for SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL. See t14536. — 3.0 also
r16138. post_class(). New post-password-required class if password required. See t13860.
r16139. post_class(). New class for post status, to facilitate styling of private posts. See t15279.
r16200. post_class(), body_class(). New classes for post formats. See t14746.
r16251. register_post_type(), register_taxonomy(). New menu_name label (defaults to name). See t14832.
r16283. body_class(). More ID-based classes. See t12397.
r16357. check_comment(). Always apply comment_text filter. See t14680.
r16432. body_class(). New admin-bar class when admin bar is displayed. See t15455.
r16447. is_feed(). Can check for feed format as well. See t15460.
r16519, r16520. wp_nav_menu(). New items_wrap argument. See t14235.
r17028. Make get_the_taxonomies() take an array of arguments. See t14740.
r17107. single_term_title(). Echo or return, not both. See t15939.
r16994. network_admin_url(). Now returns admin_url() when not multisite, like its home and site counterparts. See t15840.

DEPRECATED FUNCTIONS AND CLASSES

This part is provided for a quick overview. You don’t need to memorize it or worry about it. Just enable WP_DEBUG and it will tell you if there is anything you should not be using anymore.

r15515. print_column_headers(). Use WP_List_Table.
r15515. register_column_headers(). Use WP_List_Table.
r15531. update_category_cache(). Use global $plugin_page and/or get_plugin_page_hookname() hooks.
r15540. get_author_user_ids(). Use get_users(). See t14572.
r15540. get_editable_authors(). Use get_users(). See t14572.
r15542. get_editable_user_ids(). Use get_users(). See t14572.
r15542. get_nonauthor_user_ids(). Use get_users(). See t14572.
r15542. get_others_drafts(). See t14572.
r15542. get_others_pending(). See t14572.
r15542. get_others_unpublished_posts(). See t14572.
r15748. WP_User_Search. Use WP_User_Query. See t14579.
r16412. update_category_cache(). See t15446.

REMOVED FUNCTIONS AND CLASSES

r15678. wordpressmu_wp_mail_from(). See t14586.
r15679. admin_notice_feed(). See t14587.
r16603. check_server_timer(). See t15602.

5.9. Hooks and constants

NEW HOOKS (FILTERS AND ACTIONS)

r15316. widget_title. Filter for title of Custom Menu widget. See t14009. — 3.0 also
r15490. post_comment_status_meta_box-options. Action to allow plugins to add more options to the comment status meta box easily. See t14544.
r15600. force_filtered_html_on_import. Filter. See t14818.
r15623. wp_get_current_commenter. Filter for wp_get_current_commenter(). See t14878.
r15631. get_ancestors. Filter in new get_ancestors() function. See t12443.
r15775, r15791, r15794, r15795. posts_clauses, posts_clauses_request. Filters for WP_Query clauses. See t14997. See wp-includes/query.php for all individual filters.
r15805. custom_header_options. Action in custom header screen. See t15119.
r15837. schedule_event. Filter for wp_schedule_single_event() and wp_schedule_event(). See t15146.
r15917. add_{$meta_type}_meta, delete_{$meta_type}_meta. Actions. See t14173.
r15983. add_{$meta_type}_metadata, delete_{$meta_type}_metadata, get_{$meta_type}_metadata, delete_{$meta_type}_metadata. Filters for the *_metadata() functions. See t14766.
- r16017. Fix inconsistencies in metadata filters. See t14766.
r16000. login_footer. Action. See t5919, t15124.
r16019. Add filters to WP_Comment_Query. See t15019.
- r16020. Make comment clauses more similar to post clauses. See t15019.
r16038. show_admin_bar. Filter. See t14772.
r16047. media_upload_mime_type_links. Filter for media_upload_library_form(). See t6348.
r16130. load_image_to_edit_filesystempath, load_image_to_edit_attachmenturl. Filters in load_image_to_edit(), for better contextual filtering of path to image.
r16247. enter_title_here. Filter for placeholder in post/page edit screens. See t13386.
r16260. admin_title. Filter for document titles of dashboard screens. See t15301.
r16446. list_pages. Filter for the titles in Walker_PageDropdown. See t13668.
r16522. show_recent_comments_widget_style. Pass __return_false to remove default styles. See t15493, t14876.
r17004. network_admin_plugins_action_links. Filter. See t15850.

IMPROVED/MODIFIED HOOKS (FILTERS AND ACTIONS)

r15552. Pass more info to following notification filters. See t14743.
- wpmu_signup_blog_notification_email
- wpmu_signup_blog_notification_subject
- wpmu_signup_user_notification_email
- wpmu_signup_user_notification_subject
r15592. pre_comment_approved. Pass some context (commentdata). See t14802.
r15802. favorite_actions. Filter. Pass screen context. See t15117.
r15896. user_contactmethods. Filter. Pass user object. See t15186.
r16275. get_enclosed. Pass post ID. See t14018.
r16749. login_form_* filters. Pass args. See t15702.

NEW CONSTANTS

r15374. DO_NOT_UPGRADE_GLOBAL_TABLES. See t14221. — 3.0 also
- r16094. Prevent network creation when DO_NOT_UPGRADE_GLOBAL_TABLES is defined. See t14246.

IMPROVED/MODIFIED CONSTANTS

r15911. WP_PROXY_BYPASS_HOSTS, WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS. Now support wildcard domains. See t14636.

6. Epilogue

I hope this little presentation will be useful to you. If you have any question or if you see anything that does not look right, you are welcome to leave a comment.

I wish you a happy 2011 and happy web publishing with WordPress 3.1!

7. Changes to this document

2011-02-23: Link to 3.1 announcement.; Updates, improvements.
2011-01-24: Link to 3.1 RC3 announcement.; List tables wonʼt get AJAX and extensibility in 3.1. Ticket.; Misc updates and improvements.
2011-01-17: Debug Bar screenshot and link to westi’s introduction.; Misc updates and improvements.
2011-01-03: Misc updates and improvements.
2010-12-30: Published.

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Autotranslated themes and plugins for WordPress: An idea

demetris — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 06:53:01 +0000

If you have translated, or prepared for translation, more than a couple of WordPress themes and plugins, there are two things you must have noticed:

WordPress has a good system of internationalization and localization
The translation material can become repetitive

This first is, to my mind, one of the things that have made WordPress so popular. It is also one of the reasons we see some popular plugins and themes published in as many as 20 or 30 different languages.

The issue

The second is something normal, since there are some common things that plugins and themes usually need to say. For example:

← Previous
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etc. etc.

But the repetition starts to seem silly after a while. Why do we have to keep translating over and over strings that are not simply identical but also meant for identical contexts in one and the same application?

Some time ago I decided to translate one of my favourite WordPress themes. I opened its translation file and saw about one hundred strings in total. It’s a usual number for a WordPress theme. Of them, half were strings I had translated, or slight variations of strings I had translated, for other themes before. (For Simplish, Tarski and Thematic.)

So, I said: “No! I can’t keep doing this. It’s silly!”

Now, I happen to be the maintainer of the Greek WordPress translation and, as a result, I am familiar with the strings WordPress comes with. I knew that many strings that themes have in common existed also in the WordPress core.

The WordPress core has more than three thousand strings. Three thousand and eighty-eight (3088), to be exact, in version 3.0. (And that’s without even counting the multi-site strings.) It’s madness, but it also means that you can find almost anything in there.

And this gave me an idea to try an experiment: I was curious to see if it was possible to make a theme not simply internationalized, but also localized out of the box for a substantial part of its strings.

The method

The method I was going to follow was simple. I imagine others have tried it before.

The basic WordPress i18n functions—__(), _e(), esc_attr__() etc.—take two arguments: First, the string to be internationalized; then, the text domain. The text domain can be omitted. If it is omitted, WordPress uses the default, which is default. This is also the text domain of the WordPress core.

So, if a string of your theme or plugin, let’s say “Categories”, also exists in core, you can use the core translation by doing any of the following:

__('Categories');               #   2nd arg omitted
__('Categories', '');           #   2nd arg is empty string
__('Categories', 'default');    #   2nd arg is string “default”

Each of these will give you a string translated out of the box.

The result of the experiment

To keep a long story short, I completed the experiment and the result was better than I expected. My theme had about 100 strings in total. When I finished, seventy (70) of them were localized out of the box!

That is, a WordPress theme 70% translated out of the box!

70% fewer strings for the translators to deal with!

70% fewer things to go wrong on the translation front!

The theme’s strings even fit in one screen in Poedit. You see everything without having to scroll even once.

So, why haven’t we adopted this bright idea already?

Two small technical hurdles

As I said, I imagine other people have played with this idea before. And I suppose they too found a couple of small issues that prevented them from implementing it in practice:

First, even though the default text domain has strings for almost everything, nothing says that any one of these strings will be there in the next WordPress version. If you rely on the core translation of a string and then core modifies or removes this string, your theme or plugin will be left with a partial translation.

Second, we don’t have a script that can make a POT file with only those strings that need translation. That is, a script that makes a POT file ignoring strings with no text domain or with “default” as text domain.

NOTE. The script for making POT files for themes and plugins is at the URL below:

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/tools/trunk/

And, I have to say, it is a very convenient tool: You check the whole directory out with Subversion, run makepot.php on your plugin or theme, and you are done in a second. (Learn more.)

But it does not provide for our case yet.

My proposal

#14972: Proposal: Pool of common strings for core, themes, and plugins – WordPress Trac

I believe these two hurdles are easy to overcome, provided that we agree the autotranslation idea is good, and worth adopting and promoting.

So, I made the above proposal in the WordPress development tracker.

For the first hurdle, it proposes making the necessary modifications to makepot.php.

For the second hurdle, it says this:

Single out a few core strings that are commonly used in plugins and themes and designate them as strings for common use. Then copy these strings into a new file, say, strings-common.php. Once a string is in that file, it will not be liable to change.

Then, if core wants to modify or drop a common-use string for itself, it can do so without affecting the common pool. Plugin and theme authors can use the common pool safely, knowing that its strings are there to stay.

I have thought a bit about the idea and the implementation, and it seems to me it would bring several advantages.

It will encourage theme and plugin authors to avoid duplication by using existing strings.
- Being all in one file, the strings for common usage will be easy to discover.
It will make translating WordPress plugins and themes more attractive.
It will reduce workload and save time for translators.
- Hopefully, some of that time will go to more translations, better translations, or a bit of both.
It will improve standardization and QA for the common strings (more eyes will be on them).
- Importantly, this will also benefit core strings.
It will reduce package sizes for localized plugins and themes.

In fact, I can only think of advantages.

Your thoughts

What do you think?

/dk

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Extra Options v0.0.1: A plugin for WordPress

demetris — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 10:39:59 +0000

I am happy to announce the first public release of Extra Options, a simple plugin for WordPress.

Extra Options offers a collection of tweaks I have been using myself here and elsewhere, and that I decided to wrap in a easy-to-install plugin with a nice interactive UI.

Read more at the Extra Options homepage: op111.net/code/xo

Get Extra Options from WordPress Extend: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xo

Please note that v0.0.1 is the first public release of Extra Options and is not considered stable. In other words, it is not expected to be without errors or to work well in every WordPress setup.

Your feedback is appreciated!

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WordPress 3.0: What’s new

demetris — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:13:53 +0000

UPDATE. WordPress 3.0 was released today, Thursday 17 June 2010. Get it here or upgrade automatically!

The first release candidate of WordPress 3.0 came out on 28 May 2010. The second followed a week after that, and the final release is expected sometime after 14 June 2010.

WordPress 3.0 is a large release. The codebase underwent more changes than in any previous version (about 2700 sets of changes at this moment), and more people than ever before (above 200) contributed changes directly. However, for the most part the changes are not immediately obvious.

Much of what changed is under the surface: A lot of rewriting for the merge with WordPres MU, good features for developers, things to make WP a better tool internally, and many bug fixes. Then, there are several new user features, but some of them are not visible either unless you select to use them or unless your theme explicitly supports them.

COMPATIBILITY NOTE

Backwards compatibility is good. If op111.net is any indication, of the 25 plugins it uses 24 have been working flawlessly with WordPress 3.0. One (HeadSpace2) caused a small issue recently, because of a JavaScript conflict.

See also “Known Issues”, right below.

Known issues

Upgrading to 3.0 may need more than 32MB of memory (because the package is larger now). If you cannot upgrade because of insufficient memory, try adding in your wp-config.php this: define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M');
Plugins that replace the WordPress database class, and probably also plugins that extend it, need to be updated. This is because of substantial changes that were required for the merge with WordPress MU.
Conversion from single-site to multi-site can become problematic if subdirectories—rather than subdomains—are used.
See also the Issues, Problems and Resolutions thread at the official WordPress forum.

Highlights

WordPress MU merge

WordPress MU is a variation of WordPress designed for running multiple sites and weblogs on a single installation. As an application it is not as widely known as WordPress, but there are probably more people using it daily to publish on the web than there are using WordPress. Its users include educational institutions, research centres and publishing companies all over the world, and also services like WordPress.com (which must be the largest user of WordPress MU and for which MU was initially developed).

WordPress 3.0 brings together WordPress and WordPress MU. All MU functionality was merged into WordPress, and MU will now be discontinued. Its current version, 2.9.2, will be the last.

The merge and transition were designed to be invisible to users: Users of WordPress MU 2.9.2 will simply see a notice to update to WordPress 3.0, while users of single-site WordPress won’t see anything related to multi-site functionality unless they define a specific constant in wp-config.php.

Terminology changes

One difference users of single-site WordPress will notice is in terminology. All instances of “blog” in the administration interface were replaced with “site”, to standardize terminology between single-site and multi-site.

The new meanings, which I hope I’m getting right, are as follows:

example.com in a single-site installation is now a site (which can of course be a blog).
example.com in a multi-site installation is a network of sites and also the main site of the network (and can of course be a blog).
demetris.example.com or example.com/demetris in a multi-site installation is one of the sites that make up the network.

Trying WordPress MS

If you want to try the multi-site mode, there are two things you should know:

Setting up multi-site is not as easy as the rest of WordPress.
You should keep copies of wp-config.php and .htaccess, in case you change your mind later and want to return to the single-site mode.

Setting up WordPress for multi-site use will probably become easier in the future. In this release, however, the aim was different: To merge the two code bases as well as possible, and to make the transition seamless—even invisible—for all, both WordPress users and WordPress MU users. This aim was achieved.

DOCUMENTATION. codex.wordpress.org/Create_a_Network

Update centre

The new update centre displays in one place everything for which there is an update, and lets you update everything—WordPress itself, plugins, and themes—from the same place. It also lets you update themes in bulk, which was not possible before. Notifications of available updates appear in a little bubble next to the menu item from which the updater is accessed: Dashboard › Updates.

The update centre is my favourite new user feature in WordPress 3.0. It makes maintenance easier and it helps keep your website up to date and secure, all from a simple interface that does not betray the complexity of the underlying mechanism. (A bulk updater that works well across all the different environments and setups in which WordPress runs is not a simple matter!)

Custom post types improved and simplified

Custom post types were already possible in WordPress but the functionality was basic. In WordPress 3.0 they come with many improvements and they can have their own UI too!

What are custom post types? Think of the WordPress Posts and Pages that you already know. They are both post types, same in many ways and different in some—mainly in that Pages are arranged hierarchically, while Posts are arranged chronologically—and they exist by default in WordPress. A custom post type is a post type that does not exist by default and that you create.

And why make a custom post type?

Say, for example, that you enjoy publishing recipes but it always nagged you that in WordPress your recipes had to be either Posts or Pages. Now you can create your own post type, “Recipes”, to write about your recipes, and you can add to it exactly the set of features you want: It can have its own UI, e.g. “Edit Recipe” instead of “Edit Post”, and “Add New Recipe” instead of “Add New Post”, it can have or not have features like Excerpts, Featured Images, Comments, etc., and it can also be associated with custom taxonomies.

Custom taxonomies

Like custom post types, custom taxonomies already existed but they are now improved. One of the improvements is that they can be combined with custom post types. So, continuing the above example, if you don’t like using Tags for your Recipes, you can make a new flat taxonomy, say “Ingredients”, and associate it with the post type “Recipes”.

Not excited by all that? Don’t worry! You probably don’t need so much custom. Not everyone does. In fact, I would say that most WordPress sites can be organized perfectly well with what we already had: Posts, Pages, Categories and Tags.

Yet, custom post types and taxonomies open up new possibilities, and it would be interesting to see what applications entertaining minds find for them, especially as the functionality is refined and improved in the future.

New theme

WordPress 3.0 has a new default theme named Twenty Ten (after the year in which it is introduced).

Twenty Ten is a simple theme with a clean and modern design and a number of interesting features, my favourite among which is the array of four widget areas above the footer. In addition, and as is always the case with the default WordPress theme, it implements all the new features of this release; most notably, custom background and header (see below) and custom menus (see below).

One thing I particularly like in Twenty Ten is the collection of header images it comes with.

One thing I do not like is its typography, which I find noisy. (Too many combinations—unnecessarily many for such a clean design—of font family, font size, font style, font weight, and font colour). That is easily fixed, however, even with a very basic child theme: Unlike the previous default theme, Kubrick, Twenty Ten supports child themes well.

MORE. The story of the Twenty Ten header images by Matt Mullenweg

Twenty Ten is the only theme bundled with WordPress 3.0, since both Classic and Default (Kubrick) were removed. Both are now at WordPress Extend:

NOTE. When upgrading to 3.0 from an earlier version, Classic and Default are not removed or affected in any way!

Custom menus

The most anticipated of the many “custom” things in this release is probably the new menu creator. It lets you create navigation menus exactly how you want them, and then assign them to predefined menu locations of your theme.

One thing to note about the custom menus is that they must be supported explicitly by your theme. But you can use them even if your theme does not support them yet: The new Custom Menu widget lets you add any of you custom menus to any of your theme’s sidebars.

Another thing to note is that the custom menus are not always a viable alternative to the methods by which menus were built up to now. Why? Because they are not dynamic. For example, you cannot make an item whose subitems are all existing and future categories; or add a page to the menu and specify that all its current and future subpages be added as subitems.

I imagine theme authors will find ways to deal with that, probably by offering a choice between the two menu systems.

ACCESSIBILITY NOTE. The menu creator is fully functional without JavaScript too.

DEV

Documenation on wp_nav_menu() at the WordPress Codex
Goodbye, headaches. Hello, menus! By Justin Tadlock

Custom header and custom background

Two new APIs were introduced that make it easy for theme authors to offer options for custom header images and custom backgrounds. If your theme supports this, you will see the menu items under Appearance. We already saw the Custom Header screen in one of the Twenty Ten screenshots. Here is the Custom Background screen:

The tiled image in the screenshot is from ava7 patterns.

DEV. Twenty Ten’s functions.php is a good starting point to see how all this works.

More new things

Selectable username and password during installation

Now the installation process lets you choose username and password for the administrator account. That is, you no longer have to use “admin” or the password generated by WordPress. (Of course, you can still use these if you prefer.)

TIP. In earlier versions the admin account can be renamed with a plugin like Admin Renamer Extended.

Shortlinks

WordPress 3.0 comes with a new function that themes can use to display a shortlink for the current URL. By default, shortlinks are generated for Posts only (not for Pages or for anything else) and are of the form http://example.com/?p=123. So, for example, the default shortlink for the page you are viewing is:

http://op111.net/?p=76

op111.net uses the shortest possible permalink structure—/%post_id%—, so in this case the default shortlink happens to be longer than the long link, :-D but you get the idea.

Plugins can easily change the default form to anything they like.

DEV. Shortlink functions and their filters are all in link-template.php. Look at the inline documentation of:

the_shortlink()
wp_get_shortlink()
wp_shortlink_header()
wp_shortlink_wp_head()

Better security by default

WordPress 2.6 introduced security keys, which help add a bit more security to an installation. WordPress 3.0 adds security keys by default when setting up the configuration file of a new installation:

You can change these keys at any time, or add them if you don’t have them, by making new ones yourself or by visiting the Secret Keys Generator at WordPress.org:

https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/

(Just copy the whole lot and paste it in your config.php.)

Even more

r12523. Check PHP, MySQL versions in update response and notify if reqs are not met. See #11562.
r12815. Make login form shake when incorrect info is entered.
r13012. Twenty Ten theme initial import. See #9015.
r13026. Update keys and salts with random values from api.wordpress.org. See #12159.
r13034. Introduce DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT for enabling/disabling theme/plugin editor. See #11306.
r13041. r13574. Custom background support. Background color selection. See #12186.
r13084. Add setting for no. of comments to Recent Comments dashboard widget. See #11891.
r13134. Selectable username/password in installation. See #10396.
r13168. r13767. r14237. “Search Engines Blocked” mini-alert when Privacy is on. See #12211.
r13233. Show must-use plugins and drop-ins in Plugins screen. See #11861.
r13257. r14248. Introduce custom menus. New menu UI. See #11817. See #12713.
r13272. Enable threaded comments by default. See #11992.
r13276. Add support for non-tag taxonomies to Tag Cloud widget. See #11612.
r13403. Header image selector. See #12343.
r13424. Reject numeric page slugs (they don’t work) and force suffix. See #11917.
r13470. When deleting plugins, check for uninstall routines and warn of data deletion. See #11850.
r13516. Better readme.html. See #10835. See it while it’s fresh: http://op111.net/readme.html
r13529. Move Upload folder settings to Settings › Media. See #11687.
r13541. Display MIME type when file has no extension. See #9924.
r13573. Add options to Tools › Export. See #10317.
r13587. r13634. Show Network menu only if WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE is true. See #11644. See #11816.
r13588. Move Tools › Upgrade to Dashboard › Updates. See #12517.
r13602. r13686. New UI for bulk plugin/theme upgrades. See #11232. See #12528.
r13636. Don’t paginate comments by default in Settings › Discussion. See #12562.
r13744. Remove defunct link update checker from core. See #12437.
r13745. Remove empty Options › Misc. Redirect plugin options to Options › General. See #12437.
r13750. Change “Blog” to “Site” in Settings screens. (And in any other place in later revisions.)
r13824. r13842. r15127. Lighter header/footer for gray color scheme. New logo for header.
See #12586.
r13833. Remove “Turbo” link from admin header. See #11301.
r13879. Remove Classic and Default themes. See #10654.
r13898. Add link to Updating WordPress (Codex article). See #11280.
r13900. Add Password Mismatch feedback to Password Strength Meter. See #12576.
r13932. Fix out-of-order comments when nesting depth is reduced. See #8841. Displays child comments on same level as parent when max_depth is reached.
r13942. Better default excerpt. Remove multiple white spaces and split safely on UTF-8 strings. See #10376.
r13963. Link to new Child Themes Codex article from the Updater. See #12787.
r13981. Remove Gears from UI. See #11301.
r14010. Update stats provided to api.wordpress.org. See #12672.
r14088. Introduce DISALLOW_FILE_MOD for disabling all operations that modify core, theme, or plugin files. See #13000.
r14280. Keep “Remember me” checked when user password is incorrect. See #13165.
r14324. Change “WordPress Development Blog” to “WordPress Blog” in dashboard widget.
- r15027. Use “WordPress Blog” (instead of “Development Blog”) in initial blogroll. See #14324.
r14487. Improve cross-DST future post publishing behaviour to try and publish at correct time if we have PHP5 timezone support available to help. See #9285.
r14491. Bump memory_limit for admins in wp-admin. Should help in imports, upgrades, uploads, etc.
r14764. Move importers to WordPress Extend. See #13307.
r14836. Contextual Help for Dashboard (and for all admin screens in subsequent revisions). See #13467.
r15032. Check capabilities properly when processing bulk edited posts. Hide checkbox on Page edit screen for users without capabilities. (Also in 2.9.x.)

Highlights for developers

The part below this point is for developers, those who like getting their hands dirty, and, of course, the curious.

Multi-site things are mostly omitted here, for two reasons: First, while all are new to WordPress, most existed already in WordPress MU. Second, I know almost nothing about the multi-site functionality.

Compatibility

Backwards compatibility in version 3.0 is in general very good. Areas that may need attention are highlighted in a number of compatibility posts at the WordPress Development Updates blog:

wpdevel.wordpress.com/tag/30compat

WP_DEBUG and deprecated functions

WP_DEBUG was improved. It now informs of the version as of which a function is deprecated, and it also informs about deprecated arguments. Its definition is included for the first time by default in wp-config.php (set to false, of course), along with the recommendation to enable it when developing.

Why enable WP_DEBUG? Three reasons:

It helps make code better and future-proof
It helps make code faster: Code without errors is faster than code with errors
It helps fellow developers (who won’t have to sift through messages generated by our code when they enable WP_DEBUG to debug their code)

Andrew Nacin has more: Deprecated functions and WP_DEBUG

_option() and _transient() functions now expect unslashed data

See the explanation by Ryan Boren, and the relevant ticket:

comment_form()

I believe this new template function will become a favourite of all WordPress developers, theme authors and plugin authors. Just use:

comment_form();

… and you get a comment form that is complete, fully filterable and fully actionable.

DOCUMENTATION. codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/comment_form

get_template_part()

get_template part() is a new template function that helps avoid repetitive code in themes and makes it easier to modify themes via child themes. Again, usage is simple:

get_template_part('nav');

This will bring nav.php in, in the same way that get_header() brings in header.php and get_footer() brings in footer.php.

Of course, the above was already possible with PHP constructs like include and require. What get_template_part() adds to that is granularity and awareness of child themes.

First, it can take a second parameter. E.g.:

get_template_part('nav', 'main');

Here it will first look for nav-main.php and include it if it exists. Otherwise it will include nav.php.

Second, if the active theme is a child theme, get_template_part() looks in the child’s directory first. So, for example, you can add a nav.php template to your child theme, and it will be used instead of the nav.php of the parent.

DOCUMENTATION. codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_template_part

Hyperminimal themes deprecated

These are themes that rely on the default theme for any of header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php, comments.php, comments-popup.php. This method is now deprecated and may stop working in the future:

Themes and WordPress 3.0: Some important changes by westi (Peter Westwood)

Improved inline documentation

Over the last versions inline documentation has become more or less a requirement for any function, class and file added to WordPress. In addition, supplying documentation where it’s missing, and improving existing documentation, is an ongoing project. So, inline documentation gets better and more useful with every new release. A small example of this ongoing effort:

r12761: phpDoc for the metadata API

The official web interface of the inline documentation was also improved: phpdoc.wordpress.org/trunk

More for developers

3rd-party libraries

r12491. JSON lib updated. Use encodeUnsafe in our JSON wrapper. See #11537 for trunk.
r12521. phpass 0.2. See #10727.
r12522. SWFobject JS 2.2. See #11109.
r12557. Prototype.js 1.6.1. Scriptaculous.js 1.8.3. See #11041.
r12822. MagpieRSS deprecated. Use SimplePie (class-simplepie.php). See #11982.
r13201. r15243. jQuery UI 1.7.3. See #11595. See #13868.
r13310. jQuery 1.4.2. See #12305.
r14052. Snoopy deprecated. Use WP_Http (http.php, class-http.php). See #12882.
r14718. autocomplete.js, CodePress removed. See #13283. See #13307.
r14728. interface.js removed. See #13442.

New constants

r13034. DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT. Banishes theme/plugin editor. (By removing the edit_files, edit_plugins and edit_themes capabilities from all roles.) See #11306.
r13737. r14485. WP_DEFAULT_THEME. See #12846.
r13587. r13634. WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE. To display Tools › Network menu. See #11644. See #11816.
r14088. DISALLOW_FILE_MOD. Disables all operations that modify core/theme/plugin files. See #13000.
r14244. DISALLOW_UNFILTERED_HTML.
r15225. ALLOW_SUBDIRECTORY_INSTALL. See #13844. (For conversion to multi-site.)

New action and filter hooks

r12790. wp_die_handler. AKA “customizable death”. Filter for wp_die(). See #11892.
r13037. r14603. posts_search. Filter. Lets plugins contextually add/remove/modify search section of database query. See #10667.
r13073. activate_wp_head. Action in wp-activate.php. See #12166.
r13156. r13214. after_setup_theme. Action. Runs after parent/child themes are included. See #12231.
r13231. get_avatar_comment_types. Filter for get_avatar(), to allow avatars for custom comment types. See #11880.
r13252. template_include. Filter to modify template path before it is included. See #11242. See #12739.
r13305. show_advanced_plugins. Filter to hide mu-plugins/drop-ins tabs in Plugins screen. See #11861.
r13330. plugin_locale, theme_locale. Filters for load_*_textdomain() functions. See #9686.
r13523. tables_to_repair. Filter. See #11707.
r13430. pre_insert_term. Filter for wp_insert_term(). See #10943.
r13434. comment_duplicate_trigger. Action. Runs when duplicate comment is detected. See #12188.
r13549. pre_post_link. Filter for get_permalink() before token replacement occurs. See #12240.
r13478. paginate_links. Filter for links in paginate_links(). See #10826.
r13479. wp_link_pages_args. Filter for wp_link_pages(). See #12158.
r13481. wp_loaded. Action. Runs once WP init has finished. See #12400.
r13525. widgets_admin_page. Action at top of widgets.php. See #12190.
r13629. before_signup_form, after_signup_form. Actions. See #12199.
r13867. right_now_content_table_end, right_now_discussion_table_end. Actions. See #12202.
r13891. robots_txt. Filter for robots.txt output. See #11918.
r14067. comment_id_fields. Filter for get_comment_id_fields() See #12893.
r14382. Actions for the Widgets API. See #12546.
- register_sidebar
- wp_register_sidebar_widget
- wp_unregister_sidebar_widget
- dynamic_sidebar
- the_widget
r14814. post_updated. Action. Runs when a post is updated. See #12473.
r14996. capital_P_dangit. Default filter for the_content(), the_title(), comment_text(). (An addition that will have to be removed or modified, because it causes problems.)

New functions

r12487. is_comment_feed(). See #10827.
r12598. home_url(). Returns home option in appropriate protocol, HTTP or HTTPS. See #9008.
r12609. is_multisite(). See #11644.
r12611. is_super_admin(). See #11644.
r12659. get_intermediate_image_sizes(). See #10263. For when adding/deleting attachments.
r12696. wp_login_form(). Emits complete login form for use in templates. See #11172. CODEX.
r12714. is_main_site(). See #11644.
r12719. register_post_status(). See #9674.
r12796. WP_User::for_blog(), current_user_can_for_blog(). See #11781. To avoid calls to WP_User::_init_caps().
r12810. comment_form(). Emits complete comment form for use in templates. See #10910.
r12917. get_the_date(). See #11264. Defaults to date_format option. CODEX.
r12923. r13023. get_post_permalink(). See #9674. See #12172. Returns permalink for post of custom type.
r12946. r14417. get_available_languages(). See #11774. See #13023.
r13004. is_textdomain_loaded(). See #10527.
r13082. add_plugins_page(). Adds submenu to Plugins page. See #11377.
r13146. r13816. r14047. get_template_part(). For themes to bring in template parts. See #12371. See #12248. See #12941.
r13177. add_settings_error(). In the Settings API, to register messages for users. See #11474.
r13229. wpdb::tables(). To fetch table names on global/blog scope. See #11614. See #12083.
r13330. unload_textdomain(). See #9686.
r13358. wp_kses_named_entities(). Whitelists valid named entity references. See #12284.
r13403. r13928. register_theme_headers(), unregister_theme_headers(). See #12343.
r13409. r13806. send_nosniff_header(). Turns off content sniffing in supporting browsers. See #10671. See #12683.
r13413. r13526. r14639. r14641. Functions for returning various values to filters:
- __return_false()
- __return_true()
- __return_zero()
- __return_empty_array()
r13438. add_permastruct(), flush_rewrite_rules(). Wrappers for the WP_Rewrite methods. See #10912.
r13441. add_editor_style(). Registers stylesheet for visual editor. See #11512.
r13454. wpdb::replace(). For replacing queries. See #10864.
r13483. get_search_link(). See #10552. Has permastruct support. E.g.: http://example.com/search/foo
r13557. the_feed_link(). See #11794.
r13576. cache_users(). See #11914.
r13608. get_taxonomies(). See #12516.
r13635. r13683. wp_get_shortlink(), the_shortlink(), wp_shortlink_wp_head(), wp_shortlink_header(). See #10640.
r13658. disabled(). Form helper, companion for selected() and checked(). See #12581.
r13718. sanitize_key(). Sanitizes string keys.
r13756. apply_filters_ref_array(). See #9886. Like apply_filters(), but args passed are in array.
r13819. get_index_template(). So that child themes can override a parent’s index.php. See #12635.
r13877. remove_theme_support().
r14028. get_the_author_link(). See #12892.
r14053. is_post_type_hierarchical(). See #12950.
r14067. get_comment_id_fields(). Getter for comment_id_fields(). See #12893.
r14360. is_rtl(). See #13206. Defined when locale is loaded, cannot be used too early.
r14409. is_child_theme(). See #12998.
r14607. wp_reset_postdata(). Restores post global to current post in main query after looping through a separate query. See #12320.
r14647. _ex(). Combines _e() and _x(): Translate with context, then echo. See #13395.
r14649. wp_check_filetype_and_ext(). To handle MIME/ext image comparisons/corrections for upload/sideload. See #11946.
r14711. get_term_feed_link(). Returns feed link for taxomomy term. See #13058.
r14760. WP_Importer class. See #13034. phpDoc.
r14950. comments_link_feed(). Echoes link to comments of current post properly escaped for XML. See #13555.
r15174. get_current_user_id(). See #13785.
r15193. register_nav_menu(), register_nav_menus(). For themes to register one or more menus. See #13825.
r15203. menu_page_url(). For plugin authors, to get URLs of pages they have added. See #13829.
r15220. r14158. post_type_exists(). Checks if post type is registered. See #13747. See #12588.

Improved and modified functions

r12514. the_modified_date(). New before/after/echo args. See #11255.
r12518. get_comments(). More orderby and select options. See #10668.
r12558. WP_Dependencies. New null arg to disable script/CSS version query strings. See #11315. Useful, e.g., when scripts are loaded from an external CDN.
r12658. get_terms(). Now include and exclude args can be arrays. See #11076.
r12667. wpdb class. Compatibility with WP, MU & MS. See #11644. wp-db.php changelog.
r12719. register_post_type(). See #9674. CODEX
r13048. get_search_form(), wp_loginout(), wp_register(), get_calendar(). New echo arg. See #11842.
r13350. post_class(). New .type-{post_type} class. See #11609.
r13417. add_theme_support(). New custom-background, custom-header, nav-menus params. See #11817.
r13467. single_(post|cat|tag|month)_title(). Filters standardized on strip_tags() and wptexturize(). See #10900.
r13483. get_search_feed_link(), get_search_comments_feed_link(). Updated to use get_search_link() (new, with permastruct support). See #10552.
r13486. is_tax(). New term parameter. See #11904.
r13673. *_option(), *_transient(). Now consistently expect unslashed data. See #12416.
r13695. get_pages(). Now supports custom hierarchical post types. See #12600.
r13773. add_endpoint(). Now accepts custom Endpoint Mask. See #12605.
r13854. wp_list_categories(). Now aware of custom taxonomies. See #11838.
r13952. wp_unique_filename(). Now methods too can be a callback. See #12824.
r13978. get_search_query(). Now escapes by default, like the_search_query(). See #12780.
r13982. wpautop(). New block-level HTML5 elements. See #12335.
r13995. wp_delete_comment(). New force_delete arg. See #12766. See #11470.
r14095. wptexturize(). Improved for single quotes. See #4539. (Abbreviated years followed by punctuation or markup.)
r14131. wp_list_bookmarks(). Now orberby accepts comma-delimited list of fields. See #12421.
r14133. get_posts(), get_pages(). Now include/exclude args can be arrays. See #11076.
r14766. stripslashes_deep(). Attempt to make object-safe. See #12860.
r14887. is_singular(). Now understands custom post-types. Usage: is_singular('book') or is_singular(array('newspapers', 'books')). See #12588.
r15002. r15003. wp_constrain_dimensions(). Tweaks for better fits and consistency. See #13556.
r15107. wp_list_categories(). Now filter accepts args. See #13682.
r15188. get_page(). Now alias of get_post(). See #13753.

Deprecated functions and their replacements

r12526. Set version when function was deprecated for all deprecated functions. See #7493.
r12536. Introduce _deprecated_argument() for marking args as deprecated, so that with WP_DEBUG enabled developers can see they need to review and update their code. See #11386.
r13185. Add WP_DEBUG define to wp-config-sample.php and suggest plugin/theme developers use it. See #12236.

Following is a not complete list of functions added to the deprecated group in WordPress v3.0:

You don’t need to memorize all that, of course! Simply enable WP_DEBUG, and it will tell you if there is anything you should not be using.

r12459. _nc(). Use _nx() for specifying contexts. See #11404.
r12585. Deprecate user levels. See #10805. Use Roles and Capabilities instead.
r12624. generate_random_password(). Use wp_generate_password(). See #11746.
r13093. Move deprecated functions to deprecated.php. See #11388.
- get_the_attachment_link(). Use wp_get_attachment_link().
- get_attachment_icon_src(). Use wp_get_attachment_image_src().
- get_attachment_icon(), get_attachment_innerHTML(). Use wp_get_attachment_image().
- get_link(). Use get_bookmark().
r13096. Deprecate old L10n and sanitization APIs. See #11388.
- ngettext(). Use _n().
- ngettext_noop(). Use _n_noop().
- translate_with_context(). Use _x().
- sanitize_url(). Use esc_url_raw().
- js_escape(). Use esc_js().
- wp_specialchars(). Use esc_html().
- attribute_escape(). Use esc_attr().
r13299. clean_url(). Use esc_url(). See #12309
r13300. *_usermeta() family. Use new *_user_meta() functions. See #10837.
r13398. automatic_feed_links(). Use add_theme_support('automatic-feed-links'). See #12364.
- r13399. Restore back compat in automatic_feed_links() to deregister the extra feeds. See #12364.
r13464. get_profile(). Use get_the_author_meta(). See #10695. CODEX.
r13761. get_usernumposts(). Use count_user_posts(). See #12642.
r13805. (add|remove)_option_update_handler(). Use (un)register_setting(). See #11730.
r13988. funky_javascript_fix() and callback. See #12520.
r13991. trackback_rdf(). See #11139.
r14090. set_current_user(). Use wp_set_current_user().
r14646. get_bloginfo('text_direction'). Use is_rtl(). See #13206.
r15168. r15170. get_most_active_blogs(), get_blog_list(). See #13773.
r15220. Replace misnamed is_*() functions with *_exists() ones. See #13747.
- is_taxonomy(). Use taxonomy_exists().
- is_term(). Use term_exists().

Performance, optimization

r11976. Improve get_page_hierarchy(). See #10853.
r12464. Improve do_action() performance. Make $wp_actions an associative array. See #10561.
r12657. Switch to passing arrays instead of query strings to functions. See #6647.
r13143. Optimize single_(post|tag|cat)_title() to use WP_Query globals if available. Removes extra DB query in single_post_title() in most cases.
r13205. Bail early for favicon.ico requests so we don’t load WP twice. See #3426. Reduces server load when certain browsers arbitrarily request /favicon.ico and /favicon.ico does not exist.
r13227. Add INDEX on comment_parent to speed up wp_delete_comment() reparenting queries. See #12289.
r13576. Improve user listing performance. See #11914.
r13647. Add no_found_rows arg to WP_Query::get_posts() to allow forcibly defeating SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS. Use no_found_rows for the query in get_boundary_post(). See #12557.
r13653. Cache get_lastpostmodified() results. See #12575.
r13676. Don’t check for existence of index.php in .htaccess rewrite rules. See #11845.
r13676. Use wp_cache_set() instead of wp_cache_add() in Recent Posts and Archives widgets. See #11580.
r14139. Use relative paths when including files, to avoid include_path. See #12594.
r14665. Don’t update_post_caches() if a persistent object cache is installed. See #12611.

Other

r12602. Add multi-site settings code. Here starts the MU merge!
r12641. Allow attaching PHP 5.3 closures to filters and actions. See #10493.
r12727. Always set default timezone to UTC. Do offsets on top of that to be portable across all environments. See #9588. See #11665. See #11672.
r12914. Add phpDoc to all add_*_page() functions. Rename arguments to emphasise that people should be using Capabilities, not User Levels, and named hooks, not __FILE__. See #12101.
r12915. Support specific author templates by ID or user_nicename. See #12064.
r13032. Look for single-*.php templates. Add single- class to get_body_class(). See #12105.
r13167. r13452. r15017. Warn of unexpected output when activating plugins. See #12089. See #13585.
r13427. Use is_ssl() instead of $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'on' checks (which don’t work on all hosts). See #11885.
r13433. Consistently pass unserialized values to hooks in update_site_option(). Change add_option() and add_site_option() to do the same. Plugins using maybe_unserialize() would continue to work as the value would no longer need to be unserialized. See #10788.
r13484. Support non-BASIC authentication schemes in HTTP API if server supports them. See #4011. See #12200.
r13499. Display PHP start-up errors and warnings. See #12395.
r13456. Allow multiple To: recipients in wp_mail(). Improve handling of \r\n in headers and multiple CC/BCC headers. See #10420.
r14086. Register inherit as post status. Check parent post status when commenting on attachments.
r14111. Introduce edit_theme_options capability.
r14276. Introduce template file for front page. Has priority over other templates which apply, falls back to standard template flow for the page/list of posts. See #6801. CODEX.
r14406. Add HTML5 elements to KSES. See #12835.
r14412. Add protocols to KSES, make protocol list filterable, start esc_url() with same list. See #10914.
r15096. Introduce export capability. See #13681.
r15239. Missile guidance capabilities.

That’s it, folks!

I wish you enjoy WordPress 3.0 (once it’s officially out!) and you publish even better content with it!

Thanks for reading!

/δκ

Changes in this document

2011-01-19: Fixed link to phpdoc.wordpress.org/trunk.
2010-06-21: Link to the story of the Twenty Ten headers.
2010-06-19: Link to issues thread at the official forum.
2010-06-17: Additions. “Known issue” of insufficient memory for upgrading.
2010-06-16
2010-06-14
2010-06-13: Additions.
2010-06-12: What you need to return from multi-site to single-site (see comment no. 3 by Ron). Fixed link to Ryan Boren on *_(option|transient)() functions and unslashed data.
2010-06-11: Additions. Typos. WP/MU/MS terminology explanation corrected (see comment no. 1 by Andrew Nacin).
2010-06-10: Additions. Link to Otto on custom post-types.
2010-06-09: Improvements, additions, new links. WP/MU/MS terminology explanation to be corrected. Link to improved webif of inline docs. Link to wpdevel compatibility posts.

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WordPress 3.1: What’s new

1. Known issues and backwards compatibility

2. Highlights

2.1. Administration bar

2.2. AJAX techniques for better list browsing

2.3. Internal linking

2.4. Post formats

2.5. Network admin

2.6. More

3. Highlights for developers

3.1. Compatibility

3.2. Advanced taxonomy queries

3.3. Improved user queries

4. Selected tickets

5. Selected changesets

5.1. New functionality

5.2. Bug fixes

5.3. Modifications, enhancements, improvements

5.4. Optimization

5.5. Other

5.6. Third-party libraries

5.7. XML-RPC

5.8. Functions/Classes

5.9. Hooks and constants

6. Epilogue

7. Changes to this document

Autotranslated themes and plugins for WordPress: An idea

The issue

The method

The result of the experiment

Two small technical hurdles

My proposal

Your thoughts

Extra Options v0.0.1: A plugin for WordPress

WordPress 3.0: What’s new

Known issues

Highlights

WordPress MU merge

Terminology changes

Trying WordPress MS

Update centre

Custom post types improved and simplified

Custom taxonomies

New theme

Custom menus

Custom header and custom background

More new things

Selectable username and password during installation

Shortlinks

Better security by default

Even more

Highlights for developers

Compatibility

WP_DEBUG and deprecated functions

*_option() and *_transient() functions now expect unslashed data

comment_form()

get_template_part()

Hyperminimal themes deprecated

Improved inline documentation

More for developers

3rd-party libraries

New constants

New action and filter hooks

New functions

Improved and modified functions

Deprecated functions and their replacements

Performance, optimization

Other

That’s it, folks!

Changes in this document

_option() and _transient() functions now expect unslashed data