A few days ago I took some time after work to update my copy of Wordpress to version 2.2 as it has finally reached the stable release stage. The release has been code named Getz in honor of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz. There are some new features to mention and rather than rephrase them I will let Matt explain them from the announcement post. Here are the main features with this release:
Goodies:
WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.
The post also stats that they have added “dozens of UI and accessibility improvements, ranging from more concise wording around options and links to things like a view and preview link above the content box when you’re editing a post or page.”
There are also some features added for the development community which are also mentioned in the post:
Developer Features
A new set of WordPress-specific XML-RPC APIs that allow for editing pages, setting categories, and much more.
We now use jQuery for a number of internal functions, and hope to transition all of our JS to use it. (We still need volunteers for this.)
Comment feeds now support multiple formats, including Atom.
Our internal mail functions now use phpMailer, which allows for things like SMTP support.
You can now set database collation and character set in your config file.
You can also hardcode your site and WP URL in the config file, overriding the values in the DB.
Finally we’ve increased the inline documentation of a number of functions inside of WP, which should help you navigate those parts of the code.
Usually, I do not have any difficulties with updating my installation of Wordpress but the decision to include Wordpress Widgets as a core ability of the code base created some serious problems for me. I use K2 for my theme and they use Sidebar Modules (SBM) instead of the widgets from . Since these are two completely different approaches to the same idea, namely being able to rearrange the position of content on the Wordpress sidebar with dragging and dropping boxes around in the administrative interface.
K2 completely refused to render and pretty much was non functional after the upgrading. I did some digging on the K2 home page an luck was with me as there is already a temporary fix avaliable. After applying the fix I was able to restore the normal functionality that I expected but I came across another problem
I was able to resolve the issue after snagging a copy of the nightly builds of K2. Not everything was bad though as I have been able to fix several issues with my archives page. If any other K2 users are still having problems please feel free to contact me by leaving a comment or by using my contact form.
