WordPress News Roundup July 2003: Mike Little Overhauls the Link Manager in a Quiet Summer Month

After two releases in two months, WordPress slowed down in July 2003. There was no release, the development blog went almost silent, and the repository saw a fraction of June’s activity. Nearly all of it came from one person. Mike Little spent the month on upgrade scripts and a substantial rework of the Link Manager, while Matt Mullenweg was largely away from the code.

Quiet months were normal for a volunteer project run by people with day jobs and coursework. The work done in July still set up the larger 0.72 release that followed.

WordPress Core Updates

• Link Manager overhaul (July 31): Little described his changes in the month’s only development blog post. How links displayed could now be set for each link category in the admin, instead of through function calls with up to 25 parameters. Bloggers could add text before or after recently updated links and decide what counted as “recent.” Settings from the old links.config.php file were moving to the Options page.
• Richer link data: Earlier changes had added a large notes field to each link, intended for things like a short review of the linked site, and new functions such as get_linkobjects() for theme authors who wanted full control over link output.
• Upgrade path: Little also finished linking up the last part of the upgrade process for sites moving to the new database-driven options introduced in June.

Other WordPress News

• A hacks section takes shape: Alex King, a Denver-based developer who had moved his own blog from b2, said on July 23 that he would help Mullenweg launch a section of wordpress.org for WordPress hacks. In the absence of a plugin system, these code snippets and file patches were how users extended their blogs.

Founder of the Month: Mike Little

In a month when the rest of the team was mostly away, Mike Little kept development going. He made almost every commit in July and wrote the only development update. The Link Manager he reworked was one of the first parts of WordPress that b2 never had, and it showed how much the co-founder was shaping the software beyond his first comment.

Looking Ahead to August 2003

The next point release was in progress, and Little was about to check in a new Link Manager tab for the Options page. No release date had been set. As it turned out, August would bring the first 0.72 beta and several new contributors.