WordPress News Roundup March 2004: WordPress 1.0.2 “Blakey” Ships and a Plugin Architecture Lands in CVS

March 2004 is when WordPress committed to plugins. A small bug-fix release, 1.0.2 “Blakey”, kept the stable branch healthy. Meanwhile the team announced that the next version would be 1.2, not 1.1, and that it would include a proper plugin architecture. On March 25, Matt Mullenweg checked in the first working version of it. Custom post metadata, stricter comment moderation and better blog-client support arrived in the same few weeks.

WordPress Core Updates

• WordPress 1.0.2 “Blakey” (March 11): Named for Art Blakey, this release fixed cosmetic install and upgrade errors, an id= stripping bug, a category display bug and characters being stripped from comment URLs. It also improved Movable Type import. There were no new features.
• 1.1 skipped: Dougal Campbell explained that development had already passed all of 1.1’s milestones, so the next official release would be 1.2.
• Plugins announced: Mullenweg described the coming system. Plugins would live in a new wp-content/plugins folder, be installed by dropping in a file and be switched on from a Plugins screen in the admin. The first working code went into CVS on March 25, along with new API hooks and a note that Textile support should become a plugin.
• Post Meta-Data (March 24): Campbell introduced key/value data attached to posts, such as a mood or current song, with a basic the_meta() template tag. He predicted its real power would come from plugins.
• Moderation and feeds: New comment moderation code covered trackbacks and pingbacks, and comments with too many links could be held automatically. Michel Valdrighi brought the Atom 0.3 feed up to full validity.
• Blog clients: Campbell committed XML-RPC fixes aimed at clients such as NewzCrawler, ecto, blogtk and NetNewsWire.

Other WordPress News

• A community reporter: Cena Mayo, a Louisiana user since July 2003, joined the dev blog to cover the WordPress scene informally.
• Five kingdoms of hacks: A guide to hack sites pointed to the wiki, MtDewVirus, Weblog Tools Collection, Lester Chan’s GamerZ hacks and others, with a warning that not every hack worked with every version.
• Meet NuclearMoose: An interview with Craig Hartel, the forum regular who drew most of the site’s holiday logos and drafted a table of contents for the wiki.
• Wiki outage: The wiki went down on March 26. The cause turned out to be a glitch in the mmcache accelerator, not PHPWiki itself.
• SXSW: Mullenweg went to the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin and invited WordPress users to say hello.
• Switching help: Alex King published a Movable Type template that redirected old MT archive pages to their imported WordPress posts.

Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities

On March 29, Ryan Boren committed a fix for a security bug in the admin template editor that had been reported in the support forums. The fix went into the development code headed for 1.2. No separate advisory was issued.

Industry Trends and Insights

The number of hack sites showed both demand and the problem: every hack meant editing core files and losing changes on upgrade. Moving to drop-in plugins with activation in the admin was the most consequential decision of WordPress’s first two years. Combined with post metadata, it gave developers a supported way to build on WordPress instead of patching it.

Plugin of the Month: MtDewVirus Archives Hack

Before plugins existed, the dev blog called MtDewVirus’s archives hacks “world-famous.” Versions of the hack produced richer archive pages than WordPress offered out of the box. Hacks like it were exactly what the new plugin architecture was meant to make easy to install and safe to upgrade.

Founder of the Month: Craig Hartel

Known on the forums as NuclearMoose, Craig Hartel was the kind of volunteer the project depended on. He answered support questions, designed holiday logos for wordpress.org and organised the wiki’s first table of contents. The wiki he helped organise was the forerunner of the Codex, WordPress’s documentation site for most of the next two decades.

Looking Ahead to April 2004

Campbell wrote that the code was settling as the team moved from new features to bug fixes, and that Mullenweg hoped to release 1.2 soon. The plugin API was still being filled out with more hooks.