We’ve been taken to task for neglecting this space, so I’ll give a quick update. No, we are not dead. Quite the contrary. We are busily working on 1.3. We’ve been lowkey about the features in 1.3 because we don’t want to hype what isn’t finished. That said, we’re getting to the point where a little promotion just might be in order. Many of you have heard of and may already be using two notable features of 1.3 — Themes and Pages. A number of themes are already available for 1.3, and several sites have started using the page management abilities. Now that these features are fairly stable, the documentation team is working hard to produce some nice guides and howtos. Have a look at the Theme Development Guide for a taste of what can be done with themes.
Pages and themes aren’t all that’s been happening in 1.3. Here’s a brief, incomplete rundown.
- Permalinks and cruft-free links have received a lot of attention.
%category%and%author%permalink tags are now supported. Permalinks are now fully supported not just via mod_rewrite but also via PATH_INFO and 404. If you are using mod_rewrite, 1.3 will automatically update your .htaccess file with the necessary rewrite rules. - I18N has been expanded and improved. Plugins and themes can load their own language catalogs, and I18N URIs are now supported.
- We moved to a new XML-RPC library.
- We added support for enclosures.
- The plugin API has been greatly expanded, and we are already seeing a number of spam-fighting plugins making use of 1.3’s numerous hooks. 1.3 will have a rich variety of plugins available to combat comment spam.
Those are just a few highlights from a developer perspective. In addition to the new features, a significant amount of the effort put into 1.3 has gone into cleaning up and reorganizing the code. Despite the new features, 1.3 will be smaller and faster than previous versions of WordPress. To see what we’ve been working on and what we would still like to get into 1.3, take a look at our 1.3 goals. This is a rough outline of the changes already made to 1.3 as well as those changes we hope to make soon.
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