WordPress News Roundup August 2003: WordPress 0.72 Beta 1 Arrives as Dougal Campbell, Alex King and Michel Valdrighi Commit Code

WordPress came back to life in August 2003. Matt Mullenweg returned to the code, the development blog resumed regular updates, and the team grew. Dougal Campbell and Alex King made their first commits in the same week, and b2’s creator Michel Valdrighi arrived in the repository with a cheerful hello. By August 24, the first beta of version 0.72 was ready for testing.

WordPress Core Updates

• New options system: Mullenweg confirmed that the new database-driven options meant users would no longer need to edit a configuration file for everyday settings.
• Blog APIs: WordPress now supported the full Blogger API and MetaWeblog API, plus part of the Movable Type API, so desktop clients such as Zempt could post to it. Campbell did most of the MetaWeblog work.
• Blogger import: Mullenweg fixed the Blogger importer so post titles came across, and shortened the comment flood-protection delay to a more reasonable few seconds.
• Help hooks: Links from admin screens to matching documentation began appearing, with accessibility advice from Joe Clark.
• Cursor-aware quicktags (August 14–16): King replaced b2’s quicktag buttons with code that wrapped selected text in HTML tags, with keyboard shortcuts. Mullenweg called it one of the most useful improvements in the release.
• Password-protected posts (August 21): Checked in along with a smarter autop.
• 0.72 Beta 1 (August 24): The first beta came with an upgrade script from 0.71. The instructions joked that editing wp-config.php would probably be the last time users ever had to edit a configuration file by hand.
• After the beta: Campbell added conditional GET support to all the RSS feeds and a new get_links_list() function that output every link category as a nested list.

Other WordPress News

• Michel is back: Valdrighi’s first commit, on August 12, rewrote the convert_chars function, with a commit message saying hello again to the team. He also helped Mullenweg track down a bug that turned normal quotes into invalid characters.
• Developing in IRC: Mullenweg, Valdrighi and Campbell fixed bugs together in the #wordpress channel on freenode. An admin table was replaced with floating divs that worked better at low resolutions and in browsers without CSS.
• Site cleanup: The support forums were rebuilt with semantic lists instead of tables, and wordpress.org moved to XHTML 1.1 served as application/xhtml+xml to browsers that supported it.

Industry Trends and Insights

Supporting the Blogger, MetaWeblog and Movable Type APIs meant WordPress worked with the desktop blogging clients that had grown up around other platforms. That lowered the cost of switching, because writers could keep their favourite tools. The team was also pragmatic about standards: WordPress could output XHTML 1.1, but the default doctype stayed XHTML 1.0 Transitional for compatibility.

Plugin of the Month: Cursor-Aware Quicktags

Alex King’s quicktags were core code rather than an add-on, but they began as the kind of enhancement users would otherwise have patched in themselves. Selecting a word and pressing a shortcut to wrap it in a tag made writing in a browser textarea much less painful. Versions of the quicktags toolbar stayed in WordPress’s HTML editor for years.

Founder of the Month: Dougal Campbell

Dougal Campbell’s first commit on August 14 added a compatibility function for older PHP versions. Within days he had added full MetaWeblog API support, conditional GET for feeds and new template functions. He was one of the early developers who made WordPress a team project instead of a two-person fork.

Looking Ahead to September 2003

Testing of 0.72 Beta 1 was under way, with a second beta expected to fix the bugs testers found. Still on Mullenweg’s list were multiple categories, which he wanted working before the Movable Type importer could carry over data without losing any.