WordPress 2.8 Released – Codename Baker

By | June 10, 2009
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WordPress officially released the newest version of stand-alone blog software, WordPress 2.8.  WordPress 2.8 is name Baker, in honor of the noted trumpeter and vocalist, Chet Baker.  Below is a video about the latest WordPress release.


Source: WordPress.org

Highlights

  • New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
  • Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
  • Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
  • Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
  • Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
  • Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
  • Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
  • Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

New Features

User Features

  • New Theme Installer routines
  • Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
  • Add Documentation(function) lookup to Theme and Plugin editors
  • Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
  • Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
  • Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
  • Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
  • Don’t notify post author of own comments
  • Fix comment paging for static front page
  • Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
  • Make titles into links in Dashboard Right Now module (this was in 2.7.1)
  • Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
  • Update Blue Admin Color Scheme
  • Press This improvements UI, quoting fixes, plus ability for Contributors to use Press This
  • Add a Cancel Upload button and a Delete link to Administration > Media > Add New
  • Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
  • Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
  • Improved Widget user interface
  • Allow editing of all plugin files
  • Improved Plugin search (this was in 2.7.1) on Administration > Plugins > Add New
  • Per Page option for plugins
  • Move “Install a plugin in .zip format” to new Upload tab under Administration > Plugins > Add New
  • Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
  • Fix tags suggest for post quick edit and bulk edit
  • Permalink editor changes and fix for pages
  • Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
  • Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
  • Support more than one gallery on the same page
  • Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
  • Overhaul of LiveJournal importer (also add define WP_IMPORTING)
  • Import category descriptions for Administration > Tools > Import > WordPress
  • Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
  • Check for new version when visiting Administration > Tools > Upgrade
  • In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
  • Fix most popular link category list
  • Add description field for Tags in Administration > Posts > Tags
  • WAI-ARIA landmark roles to added to WordPress Default theme
  • “Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
  • Remove My Hacks option from Administration > Settings > Miscellaneous
  • Hide email addresses from low privilege users on Administration > Comments
  • Allow case-insensitive logins
  • Login and Registration pages noindex followed
  • Give login screen proper iPhone viewport
  • Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
  • Make user_nicenames unique during registration
  • Add “Send this password to the new user by email” option to Administration > Users > Add New
  • Don’t set user’s Website url to http:// in Administration > Users > Add New
  • Add password strength meter to Add User and Edit User
  • Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
  • Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
  • Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers

Development, Themes, Plugins

  • Improved database performance
  • Drop post_category column from wp_posts table, and link_category column from wp_links schemas
  • Fix delete statements to ensure data integrity when innodb and foreign keys are used
  • Enforce consistent ID types to allow for foreign keys to be defined between tables
  • Add Sticky to list of post states
  • Add a filter to the post states list
  • Introduction and widespread use of transient and related filters
  • Add filters so AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber IM labels, in user profile, can be changed
  • Add hook “after_db_upgrade”
  • Add hooks for the Users, Categories, Link Categories, Tags and Comments table columns
  • HTTP API updates and fixes
  • Add support for blocking all outbound HTTP requests
  • Updated List of HTTP status codes
  • Use SimplePie for widget and dashboard feeds
  • Switch to pomo lib. Support gettext contexts. Deprecate long form functions
  • TinyMCE 3.2.4.1
  • Use Jcrop 0.9.8 for cropping
  • Update pclzip to 2.8
  • Update PHPMailer to 2.0.4
  • Update SWFUpload to 2.2.0.1
  • Improved performance for script loading
  • Improved archive and calendar queries
  • Cron spawning improvements
  • Timezone enhancements for PHP 5
  • Add WP_Widget class and move native widgets into WP_Widget
  • Allow other taxonomies (e.g. post categories) to be used with wp_tag_cloud
  • Add echo argument to wp_tag_cloud()
  • Allow a plugin to control how many posts are displayed on edit pages
  • Add “style” and “html” arguments to wp_list_authors
  • Add “exclude_tree” argument to wp_list_categories and make exclude behave like exclude_tree when hierarchical is specified–this was actually a 2.7.1 change
  • New Template Tag, the_modified_author
  • Enhanced support for custom taxonomies
  • Put page title before blog name in admin title
  • Use https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ for the WordPress.org secret-key service
  • Various phpDoc updates
  • Refactor filters to avoid potential XSS attacks
  • XMLRPC improvements
  • Improved mysql2date coding
  • Make authentication more pluggable
  • Switch to using the ID when calling get_avatar internally to support caching plugins
  • Allow plugins to provide a canonical redirect_url even if WordPress does not provide its own
  • Drafts have post_date populated now, so look for a zeroed out post_date_gmt to determine non-scheduled nature
  • Fixes to query_posts (obey post_type, drop orderby=category, use group by for meta key queries, remove meta_value from selected fields)
  • New orderby=none parameter for use with query_posts
  • Allow a plugin to filter the classes applied in wp_list_pages()
  • Functions (get_adjacent_post_rel_link() and adjacent_post_rel_link()) to display relational links for adjacent posts in the head
  • Add the sticky post grey background to the default theme
  • Proxy support
  • Let a plugin filter the expanded capabilities returned by map_meta_cap
  • Allow the update period to be filtered in RSS/RDF feeds
  • Store field types in wpdb object
  • Add tag description functions tag_description and term_description
  • Add page class to get_body_class()
  • Deprecate get_catname()
  • Use comments_open() and pings_open() in WordPress Default and Classic themes
  • Add wp_trim_excerpt() filter
  • Consolidate plugin/theme/core upgrade/install functions
  • Add page-id-x class to body for pages
  • Return empty list in wp_list_bookmarks() if requested bookmark category does not exist
  • Allow menu reordering via plugin
  • Add hook for updating user profile
  • Add redirect argument to wp_loginout
  • Add wp_lostpassword_url
  • Add get_the_author_meta() and the_author_meta() functions
  • Deprecate the_author_ID, the_author_login, the_author_firstname, the_author_lastname, the_author_nickname,the_author_email, the_author_url, the_author_aim, the_author_yim, the_author_mns, the_author_description and all their “get_*()” functions. (The full list at wp-includes/deprecated.php)
  • Let plugins use screen layout columns
  • Add labels to titles and text inputs
  • Add hook for adding info to plugin update message
  • Don’t do core version check from front page loads
  • Allow a plugin to vary the comment cookie lifetime (or even remove the cookies altogether)
  • Allow plugin to replace just the default help while preserving the contextual help
  • New escaping naming convention
  • Deprecate wp_specialchars() in favor of esc_html(). Encode quotes for esc_html() as in esc_attr(), to improve plugin security (ref. Development Updates)
  • Deprecate sanitize_url() and clean_url() in favor of esc_url_raw() and esc_url() (ref. Development Updates)
  • Add number/offset arguments to get_pages() (same parameters can be used for wp_list_pages()
  • Make login more pluggable
  • Add the_widget() function to output a generic widget anywhere in a template
  • Allow plugins to override tz support enable/disable
  • Fix combining category and tag queries
  • Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
  • Recognize Expression Web 2 as IIS
  • Allow multiple search form templates
  • Introduce sanitize_html_class() and use it to give categories, tags, users etc meaningful classnames where possible but fallback to the id if necessary
  • Allow a different role to be set for users when they are created in a call to wp_insert_user()
  • Improve Filesystem method choice for ‘direct’; introduce FS_METHOD constant
  • Add a hook in print_footer_scripts as in print_head_scripts
  • Add a comment_moderation_headers filter
  • Move upload_dir filter to before directory is created, so plugins can have a better effect
  • Pass name to sidebar, footer, and header get actions
  • Upgrader improvements, including move curl to last position and fockopen to 2nd position due to higher compatibility
  • Updated Trac
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