WordPress News Roundup November 2004: Themes and Pages Previewed for WordPress 1.3 as Firefox 1.0 Ships

After weeks of quiet, the WordPress dev blog explained in November 2004 what the team had been building. On November 17, Ryan Boren posted “What’s Going On?,” saying that two headline features of 1.3, Themes and Pages, were stable enough that people were already using them. The next day Carthik Sharma explained the new theme system in detail. Elsewhere, Firefox 1.0 was released, and a new group of spam-fighting plugins was being built on 1.3’s expanded hooks.

WordPress Core Updates

• Themes: Instead of controlling everything through index.php, 1.3 let users install and switch between themes. Blogs upgrading from 1.2 or 1.2.1 could keep their old templates. Several themes for 1.3 were already circulating, and a Theme Development guide went up on the Codex.
• Pages: Page management was in use on early-adopter sites. Comments were allowed on Pages from November 17, and the admin menu item was renamed from “Front Page” to “Pages.”
• Permalinks: %category% and %author% tags were supported, clean URLs worked through PATH_INFO and 404 handling as well as mod_rewrite, and WordPress updated .htaccess automatically. Requests that matched no posts now returned a proper 404.
• International and syndication: Plugins and themes could load their own translations, internationalised URLs were supported, WordPress switched to a new XML-RPC library, and feeds gained enclosure support.
• Plugins: The API grew substantially, plugins could live in subfolders of wp-content/plugins, and new get_plugins() and get_plugin_data() functions read plugin headers. Mullenweg added a hook to the comment form.
• Anti-spam fixes: Dougal Campbell rejected numerically encoded characters in the normal ASCII range, a spammer trick, and fixed moderation keywords containing # characters.
• Smaller and faster: Boren said that despite the new features, 1.3 would be smaller and faster than previous versions because so much code had been reorganised. A public list of 1.3 goals tracked what was done and what was left.

Other WordPress News

• Firefox 1.0 (November 9): Campbell marked the release by sharing a BitTorrent download for Windows while Mozilla’s servers were overloaded.
• Translators at work: A run of internationalisation patches from Nikolay Bachiyski fixed string markup and made more of the interface translatable in the last week of the month.
• Stay in touch: Developers were pointed to the wp-hackers list as the best place to follow 1.3 development.

Industry Trends and Insights

Firefox 1.0 gave standards-minded developers a mainstream browser to rally behind, which suited a project that had promoted valid XHTML since its first release. Comment spam, meanwhile, had become the biggest daily problem for anyone running a blog. WordPress’s answer for 1.3 combined some built-in protections with hooks that let plugin authors compete on solutions.

Founder of the Month: Nikolay Bachiyski

Nikolay Bachiyski, a Bulgarian developer, sent the patches that made more of WordPress’s interface translatable this month. Boren committed several of them in the final week of November. It was the start of a long involvement: Bachiyski later became one of WordPress’s core developers and did much of the project’s internationalisation work.

Looking Ahead to December 2004

1.3 was still in development, with no release date, and the documentation team was writing guides for themes and Pages. A maintenance release for the 1.2 branch was also needed to fix outstanding login and security issues for users who were not ready to move to 1.3.