WordPress News Roundup August 2004: Static Pages Land in 1.3 Development as a PHP 5.0 Bug Trips Up Logins

August 2004 had no release, but it brought one of the most important features in WordPress history into development. On August 10, Ryan Boren committed “Static pages. Take 1,” the start of what became Pages. Over the rest of the month, template redirection, a 404-based permalink handler and the first header and footer templates followed. Together they pointed toward a template system that could handle more than a single index.php file.

For users, the main problem of the month was PHP 5. Some people found WordPress crashing at login, and the team traced the cause to a bug in PHP itself.

WordPress Core Updates

• Static pages (August 10): Boren’s first version of standalone pages arrived. These were posts outside the chronological blog, for content such as an About page. Pages would be one of the defining features of the next release.
• Template redirection (August 24): WordPress could now choose different template files for different kinds of request. Mullenweg began splitting templates into header and footer pieces on August 20.
• Permalinks everywhere: Boren completed %author% support in post permalinks, added search permalinks with feed and paging support, and wrote a 404 handler so clean URLs could work on servers without mod_rewrite.
• Blog APIs: Michel Valdrighi added Blogger editPost and deletePost, MetaWeblog newPost, editPost and getPost, and media upload support, noting along the way that one popular client, Ecto, was sending too many bytes.
• Plugins and XFN: Mullenweg changed how the active plugin list was stored and made sure plugins loaded on the plugins page itself. Dougal Campbell added support for XFN 1.1.

Other WordPress News

• Staticize opened up (August 22): Mullenweg opened Staticize, a caching plugin, so other developers could work on it.
• Smaller edit screen: The Manage Posts screen was limited to 15 posts at a time unless filtered by month, keeping it fast on blogs with long archives.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

No WordPress security issues were announced. The month’s stability problem came from upstream. In a post on August 7, the team explained that a bug in PHP 5.0.0 caused Apache to crash when users logged in to WordPress on some server setups. The bug appeared to be fixed in PHP’s development code, and the team expected the first PHP 5 bug-fix release to resolve it.

Industry Trends and Insights

Pages were a quiet but major change. A blog engine that could run static pages alongside posts could run a whole small website, not only a weblog. That idea took WordPress toward being a general content management system. Better blog-client support pointed the same way: people wanted to write in the tools they liked and publish anywhere.

Plugin of the Month: Staticize

WordPress built every page on request, which made it easy to change but put load on servers when traffic spiked, as wordpress.org had found during May’s Slashdot visits. Staticize cached generated pages to reduce that load. Opening it to other developers this month led to Staticize Reloaded and, later, the WP-Cache family of caching plugins.

Founder of the Month: Michel Valdrighi

A year after reappearing with a cheerful first commit, b2’s creator was doing detailed work in WordPress’s XML-RPC layer, adding the API methods desktop blogging clients needed. It was a fitting role for the developer whose original b2 had shipped with Blogger API support.

Looking Ahead to September 2004

Pages and template redirection were still rough and needed more work before 1.3. Another round of WordPress Meetups was being organised through Meetup.com for September.