WordPress 3.0 Thelonious passed 3 million downloads yesterday, and today the plugin directory followed suit with a milestone of its own: 100 million downloads. The WordPress community’s growth over the years has been tremendous, and we want to reinvest in it. So we’re taking the next two months to concentrate on improving WordPress.org. A major [...]

A weekend present, in haiku:
Last call; final bugs
Itch, scratch, contort; calmly wait
For now: RC3
That’s right. What will hopefully be the final release candidate, RC3, is now available for download and testing.
Plugin developers: test your pl…

When I was a kid my dad used to practice his typing skills (on a real typewriter no less) with the phrase: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. For some reason that has stuck with me all these years. Today I’m going to rephrase and [...]

As Matt teased earlier, the first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 3.0 is now available. What’s an RC? An RC comes after beta and before the final launch. It means we think we’ve got everything done: all features finished, all bugs squashed, and all potential issues addressed. But, then, with over 20 million people using [...]

Has it really been seven years since the first release of WordPress? It seems like just yesterday we were fresh to the world, a new entrant to a market everyone said was already saturated. (As a side note, if the common perception is that a market is finished and that everything interesting has been done [...]

Following the successful post-WordCamp San Francisco code sprint, we are now ready to release the second beta of WordPress 3.0. Things to test: Revised menu user interface Changes to the WordPress exporter and importer to make it more flexible Already have a test install that you want to switch over to the beta? Try the [...]

Early next week, we’re hoping to release the 2nd beta release of WordPress 3.0 on our journey toward the final version. There are still over 200 bugs in the 3.0 milestone, and we can use all the help we can get on fixing these problems. If you’re a developer, take a look at the list [...]

Summary: A web host had a crappy server configuration that allowed people on the same box to read each others’ configuration files, and some members of the “security” press have tried to turn this into a “WordPress vulnerability” story. WordPress, like all other web applications, must store database connection info in clear text. Encrypting credentials [...]

Remember when I posted earlier about the Twitter account, and I said that hopefully you’d find out later today what has been keeping us all so busy? Beta testers, this is your moment: the WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 has arrived!
This is an early beta. This means there are a few things we’re still finishing. We [...]

Scene: A college classroom
Professor: So. Out of the 20 students in the class, half wrote WordPress Summer of Code proposals good enough to receive an A. How many of you are planning to apply for the program?
Jack, a student: I am. They opened applications today.
Sophie, a student: I am. And that sentence was grammatically terrible.
Jack: [...]

Scene: A college classroom
Professor: Is anyone here applying for Google Summer of Code this year? If so, see me after class to discuss getting independent study credit toward your degree.
Jack, a student: Isn’t that a really hard program to get into? Like, hard like getting to level 70 in Modern Warfare 2?
Sophie, a student: I [...]

A Report from the 3.0 Development Cycle
Menus
There’s been a flurry of blog posts about the integration of the WooThemes Custom Navigation into WordPress core, so I thought it was time we posted the official word. For 3.0, the main user-facing feature we wanted to include was a better site menu management system. Currently, dealing with [...]

I like to moderate comments when I’m waiting for something: a checkout clerk to help me, the dentist to call me back to the office, a soy chai to be made. I don’t lug my laptop everywhere I go,* so I love it that we have mobile apps that make this possible. I don’t know [...]

Thanks to everyone who tested 2.9.1 Beta 1.  We’re following that up with Release Candidate 1.  RC1 contains a few more fixes, bringing the number of fixed tickets up to 23.  If you are already running Beta 1, visit Tools->Upgrade in your blog’s admin to get RC1.  You can also  download the RC1 package and [...]

Merry Christmas! One of the things that was discussed at the core commit team meetup was release scope (and scope creep). Now that 2.9 is out and it’s time to start thinking about 3.0, we think it would be appropriate to stop and take a breath before diving in, and make a plan in advance. [...]

After the video from the core team meetup was posted, the topic that seemed to get the most attention on Twitter and various community sites was Matt’s announcement that there would be a new default theme in 2010, so I thought I’d start with that as the first of the meetup summaries.
When Kubrick was bundled [...]

We’re at that exciting point in WordPress development where the dev team feels like version 2.9 is complete and ready for the world.
If you’ve been waiting for your moment to pitch in, it’s now. First we need tech savvy testers to upgrade their blogs and kick the tires, make sure everything is rolling like you [...]

To get started, here’s a short video from the meetup discussing some of the topics and 2.9. In the opening pan, you’ll see (L-R) Andrew Ozz, Mark Jaquith, Jane Wells, Peter Westwood, and Ryan Boren, followed by Matt Mullenweg as the first person talking. Tip: go full-screen in HD to feel like you were there.

Last [...]

There have been a lot of references to “canonical plugins” over the past year, especially at WordCamps by Matt, but we haven’t really posted anything official about the idea, nor have we really made much progress beyond discussions about how awesome it would be to have canonical plugins and how good it would be for [...]

Version beta-2 of WordPress 2.9 is ready for your testing pleasure. You can download it or use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin and auto-upgrade a test installation. See all changes since beta 1.

Just in case anyone forgot, the first of the November bug hunts for version 2.9 is now in progress, and will last another day. If you’ve got a dev environment set up, please consider pitching in to run some tests and help get us closer to the 2.9 milestone release.

As we near completion of the 2.9 milestone, it’s that time of dev cycle again, when we ask all you community developers who’ve been putting off contributing to core to dust off your dev environments and help us get closer to being release-ready. How? Bug hunts! Yes, that time-honored tradition (in the time of WordPress, [...]

The number one reason people give us for not upgrading to the latest version of WordPress is fear that their plugins won’t be compatible. As part of our continuing efforts to make WordPress core, plugin, and theme upgrades as painless as possible, Michael Adams developed and launched a beta of a new “Compatibility” feature in [...]

We have been hard at work now for a few months on the new features that will be coming in WordPress 2.9, and we are near the time when the first beta version will be available. We’ll need your help with beta testing the new features and ironing out any bugs.
There are a number of [...]

A stitch in time saves nine. I couldn’t sew my way out of a bag, but it’s true advice for bloggers as well — a little bit of work on an upgrade now saves a lot of work fixing something later.
Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. [...]

Every now and then I see someone ask in the dev channel how they can meet up with other local WordPress developers. We’re thinking about ways to make WordPress.org more of a resource to facilitate local connections, but in the meantime, I thought it might be helpful to publicize some upcoming WordCamps, the [...]

The WordPress team had initially committed to maintaining the WordPress 2.0.x legacy branch until 2010. Unfortunately, we bit off more than we could chew—the 2.0.x branch is now retired and deprecated, a few months shy of 2010.
Many of the security improvements to the new versions of WordPress in the last couple of years were complete [...]