Nikoport

“Wordpress is as good as it Getz“. After just a couple of weeks of delaying, the new Wordpress version is available. This is a second major upgrade for Wordpress this year, which comes as a new politics of Wordpress developers, but anyway, full of new enhancements the new Wordpress version has arrived and we are all encouraged to upgrade to it.
Some explanation – Getz is the name of a one of the most famous and recognized tenor saxophone player Stan Getz. This way, wordpress continue giving the name of music artists to the new releases.

While still thinking whether i should upgrade the wordpress, i have noticed a new article at the Wordpress dashboard, referring the security fixes that the new Wordpress version includes.

Mark Jaquith wrote that there are some important security issues, which were fixed in the new Wordpress version, but what is more interesting, that at the same day, at his blog he wrote
I’ll have upgrade files for 2.0.11 once it is released, and if 2.2 sees any security/bugfix releases, I’ll do upgrade files for those too. For me this is quite an interesting, that somebody posting 2 opposite things at the same hour.

What surprises me in this story, is the fact (if its really true), that no upgrade version for 2.1 and 2.0 branches has been released by now. Wordpress has a good fame of supporting elder releases and leaving users who can not upgrade (mysql version problems for example) is quite a sad fact. I have thought about ignoring this release for a couple of days, or at least testing it locally, before upgrading, but this leaves no option but to do wordpress upgrade as soon as possible.

Wordpress 2.2 has been delayed probably until June, this news come not as a big surprise, even when just 4 months ago, the exact date of 23rd of April was announced.
I confess, that i have had some extremely high hopes, when Wordpress 2.1 came out, but the truth is, the more functionality is to be implemented, the bigger the delay will be, that the reality of the software design and software programming.

Software development is a creative process, which is not easy, and there are always so many things beyond developer’s imagination, so it is really hard to predict an exact date for its end, every developer knows exactly what i am talking about. Every time we push ourself into creating something new, we basically are discovering the unknown, which may take quite a lot of time, even when the developer is very experienced and has a lot of knowledge, there is no guarantee, that he won’t face something, he is incapable to solve in the short period of time.

The new functionalities which are to be introduced in Wordpress 2.2 these are those, which i consider to be the most important and the most interesting:

1. PhpMailer – it will surely improve the performance, especially on those sites, where a lot of emails been sent (new comments, new users, polls, backups, as well as moderations in general)
2. Permalink Redirection – goodbye my beloved redirection plugin ? this functionality is extremely important to me, as if i decide to alter the name of the post, all the links pointing to it, won’t vanish in vain, and no penalty will be cast by the search engines
3. Multiple format comment feeds, including Atom 1.0 – a natural development and support of the current standards, which is important
4. Improved comment editing – this is something interesting to look for, especially for those sites, which have a lot of comments
5. MySQL 4.1 – this is not a new functionality, but those sites, whose providers are still using MySQL versions below 4.1 will face a big problem with upgrade to Wordpress 2.2, but luckily even Wordpress 2.0 will be supported for 2.5 more years.
6. Tagging support – this is one more functionality which may obsolete some of the very popular plugins, but that’s life, and since a lot of people really using and needing this functionality, there is no surprise that it has found its way into the new version of Wordpress
7. Widgets – whole world is so crazy about them – OS X, Windows Vista, Yahoo have them already, the most of the programs are implementing, and now we will have a blogging software widgets. =O)

I think that Wordpress developers has done what is right – delaying publishing online an unfinished software. This way people won’t scream about the bugs, won’t claim that what was promised was never delivered and so on. Take your time guys, do what is necessary, you as well as Apple with its OS X delay are well supported by your users. We have enough time to wait for a good, finalized software.

Portuguese Government has their official blog now. It is called “A Nossa Opinhão” (in transl. our opinion), which is quite a serious name for a blog. =O) No politic opinions will be ever published on my blog, so do please not make any interpretation about my personal opinion. The fact, that the Portuguese government has finally started reaching out to the internet, is a very important pass into the future.

Just like the vast majority of the bloggers at the moment, the Portuguese government blog is based on Wordpress, but their blog implementation is quite an interesting subject for an investigation – first of all is the question, which version of Wordpress is it running, is it the infamous 2.11 with all the bugs and back doors inside ? Secondly, Andreas Viklund should not be very happy about his theme been used for the portuguese government blog, but no credits were left on their page, the only thing that points out to him is the commentary, which was probably forgotten at the footer of the blog’s page.Well, i think that he should know about this fact right at this moment, as i have left a commentary on his page =O) Third is the accesibility of the page is quite frankly forgotten – it is quite clear, that the text is being inserted into the blog, directly from the Word – by copy and paste, otherwise such nasty things like this:

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 200%"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: Verdana">

or having code like that:

<o:p></o:p>


A very interesting aspect is a design of the site, as right now it has no archives and has no menu what so ever, but with the time it should have them, or at least i hope, that the site “designer” will include them on the main page. The title of the blog is all caps “A NOSSA OPINHÃO”, which stays for screaming, but may be it is the idea of this blog… to scream at the readers, which are uncapable to comment on any of the subjects. This is a good idea, since there would be way too many comments not on the subject from all the scam of the net and from the opposite parties as well =O)

Anyway i just want to congratulate António Costa, the portuguese minister of internal affairs, with a creation of a this blog, with advancing and pushing the others into the digital age, as it is extremely important. Good luck with the exploring and facing the reaction of the net. =O)

Today i have a very distinctive plug-in for wordpress “Tiger Style Administration“, which completely redesigns the administration of the wordpress. It changes completely the look and feel of wordpress administration to be similar to the latest OS X release 10.4 codename Tiger. I think that orderedlist (the authors of this plug-in), has got the right feeling about implementation, and this “skin” turns the wordpress administration from a dark blue into a light white style. All the changes are done with a css style sheet, which could be a very good study for any css specialist or enthusiast.

There are still some minor glitches, but they really small and easy to ignore. This is a plug-in i can really recommend to anyone, being tired with the default settings of the wordpress administration console. If there is something really out of control at the panel, then you can just overwrite and modify the css style to something, that you find acceptable, so for any advanced css author, there are no limitations.

This style and example also can serve as a inspiration to do more plug-ins like this one, but exploring other themes like Linux or Playstation or whatever, as people are always welcoming the adaptation of their favorite platform or game or whatever. =O)

After working with a software done by the amateurs, it is a great pleasure seeing and working on something that is implemented with so much imagination and care.

These all open-source community troubles with hackers happened on a regular basis, but this time, such software as a Wordpress was affected, which has without any doubt, the biggest blogging base on the net. This time, a hacker, has managed to alter the source available for download, which people all over the net has downloaded last week, including some back-doors and stuff like that.

No matter what the fact is, the most important point about this attack is very clear – such thing would hardly ever happened to a close source program. First of all, only in an open-source project it is possible for someone completely unknown to contribute to the software development directly, without strong control, secondly – someone who is working for a firm, will have some serious legal difficulties, based on the contract, the firm will most probably sue “the contributor” and hence, he won’t be able to find any reasonably job in our industry, but in open-source you are just an email, registered somewhere at the free email service, like Google or Hotmail.

I think that open-source community should use this chance and the lesson by learning and improving the security system. Previously, I have praised a lot wordpress developers, and i still do, such thing could have happened to any popular open-source project. Now the most important is to implement the system, which would protect users from such attacks, increasing the security of the contribution code, increasing the difficulty of such attack again, but i don’t believe in any real measure which would allow eliminate such threats at all, since open-source idea is based on the trust and willingness to help, which sometimes is just a wish to harm.

Half an hour ago, one year after last major release, Wordpress 2.1 with over 550 fixes, was finally released to the masses. I am extremely excited about it, and without any doubt going to upgrade my blog to it in the next hours. As a development team has promised they have released it in January this year, i think this is a fantastic fact, thinking that the vast majority almost everyone is being late on their releases and fast on the promises.

The name Ella Fitzgerald was selected to honor one of the most famous jazz singers, Ella Fitzgerald, she was a fantastic singer i have to add. Her voice is something that the most people who have heard her wont be able to forget.

I really have to thank the developers promising continuous support for 2.0.x branch for (take a long breath) 3 more years until 2010. Even more surprise for me is to realize that the developers already announced a date for a next release – 23rd of April this year, and if they are going to complete it – i am going to propose to vote them all for congress … =O) hahaha. My deepest respect guys, as for a long time in our industry(and not only in our industry actually) i have not seen such quality of following the promises.

A new version of wordpress was released a couple of hours ago. Its nice to see that the developers are not intimidated by the success and continuing the development. The last version of wordpress was released something like 3 monthes ago, and i thought that it was a good time for a new release. New Release is authentically a bug-fix patch with some security and some internationalization improvements. I am still waiting for a 2.1 release, which at this moment seems to be relatively close, and maybe some time around January, as 1 year ago with 2.0 release, we will have Atom1.0 and all the rest of the improvements that the wordpress developers are promising.

Recently I have found an alternative for the RSS google sitemap submission, since for quite some time the wordpress RSS has produced several errors which have bugged google sitemaps for quite some time. Seems that it works fine, with the downside of manual regeneration of them – each time after a new post one have to go to the plugins and manually regenerate it.

With Joomla 1.5Beta is already available for download and a new version of Textpattern and Drupal, Vista etc i think that every major open project is releasing something before Christmas.