WordPress News Roundup December 2004: WordPress 1.2.2 Ships, Planet WordPress Launches and 1.3 Becomes 1.5

WordPress ended 2004 with a security update, a renumbered release and its future default design. WordPress 1.2.2 fixed bugs and security issues for the stable branch on December 15. Nightly builds became automatic, and Planet WordPress started collecting the community’s blogs in one place. On December 29 the team confirmed that the next release, long called 1.3, would be numbered 1.5. The next day Kubrick was added to the codebase.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 1.2.2 (December 15): Recommended for all 1.2 users, it fixed login problems, a security issue affecting a specific IIS and PHP combination, a Last-Modified header bug, how site moves were handled and email encoding. The team apologised that the release had taken longer than some expected, explaining that several issues had been combined so users would only have to upgrade once.
• Automatic nightlies (December 3): Nightly builds were now generated automatically every night, though not recommended for production sites. The development version reached 1.3-alpha-5.
• 1.3 becomes 1.5 (December 29): After testers noticed the nightly version number had jumped, the team explained with a list of joke theories and one real reason: the codebase had changed enough to justify a bigger number.
• Theme plumbing: Boren moved permalink handling into a new WP_Rewrite class. Themes could now provide their own header, sidebar and footer files, and page templates gained headers. A new get_pages() function and an improved wp_list_pages() used contributions from Adi Sieker and Chris Waigl.
• Kubrick arrives (December 30): Mullenweg added Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick to the codebase and moved the default template files into wp-includes.
• Dashboard and safety: A new dashboard with aggregated WordPress news, based on code from Chris Davis, went in on December 19. wp-config.php could no longer be viewed or edited through the web interface, and password resets used stronger randomness.

Other WordPress News

• Planet WordPress (December 3): An aggregator brought together posts from developers’ blogs, including Alex King, Donncha Ó Caoimh and Dougal Campbell, along with Blogging Pro and the dev blog.
• Debian package: Debian’s WordPress maintainer released a package for 1.2.1.
• Mailing lists move: The discussion lists were offline for a few hours on December 23 while archives and subscriptions moved to a new system.
• Broken blogs explained: When hosts upgraded to PHP 4.3.10 without updating the Zend Optimizer, some blogs showed alarming SQL errors. The team reassured users that their data was safe and that the fix belonged to the host.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

• 1.2.2 security fix: The release closed an issue affecting sites on a particular IIS and PHP setup, and all 1.2 users were advised to upgrade.
• Comment spam: A December 12 post urged users to protect themselves before 1.3’s new defences arrived. It pointed to Podz’s Combat Comment Spam page on the Codex, Kitten’s Spaminator, Spam Karma and Jay Allen’s comment spam research from the Movable Type side.

Industry Trends and Insights

By the end of 2004, WordPress was clearly more than a b2 fork. It had plugins, themes and Pages on the way, a documentation site, a bug tracker, mailing lists, an aggregator and its own news blogs. The biggest threat across every blogging platform was comment spam, and how each handled it would shape the next year. For WordPress, the answer arrived in 2005 with Akismet.

Plugin of the Month: Spam Karma

Dr Dave’s Spam Karma scored each comment on dozens of signals, such as the age of the post and how quickly the comment was submitted. Borderline commenters could raise their score by passing an image or email check. It was one of the two plugins the dev blog highlighted this month, and it showed what the plugin architecture made possible.

Founder of the Month: Podz

Podz, a prominent volunteer on the support forums, wrote the Combat Comment Spam guide that the dev blog recommended to every user. It collected dozens of methods in one Codex page and was updated as new tools appeared. Volunteers like Podz turned the Codex into the place WordPress users learned to run their sites.

Looking Ahead to January 2005

WordPress 1.5 was the focus, with themes, Pages, new spam protections and the newly added Kubrick still to finish and test. It would ship as 1.5 “Strayhorn” on February 17, 2005, with Kubrick as the default theme.