WordPress News Roundup October 2003: WordPress 0.72 Ships With Password-Protected Posts and a Dave Shea Template
October 2003 brought WordPress 0.72 with a security fix, password-protected posts and a Dave Shea template, plus early cruft-free permalinks in CVS.
WordPress 0.72 Ships
With Password-Protected Posts and a Dave Shea Template
October 2003 brought WordPress’s biggest release so far. Version 0.72 arrived on October 11 after a short release-candidate cycle. It combined an important security fix with a long list of features, including a new default template by designer Dave Shea. Before the month ended, Matt Mullenweg had put two long-wanted features into CVS: separate Write and Edit screens, and configurable, search-friendly permalinks.
Hosted blogging grew too. Six Apart launched TypePad in October, giving Movable Type’s makers a paid hosted service.
WordPress Core Updates
- 0.72 Release Candidate 1 (October 4): Put out for quick feedback because it fixed an important security vulnerability.
- WordPress 0.72 (October 11): New features included password-protected posts, cursor-aware quicktags, full or nearly full Blogger, MetaWeblog and Movable Type API support, a template design from Dave Shea, configuration without editing files, a new Blogger importer, comment feeds, conditional GET for RSS, better auto-formatting, an improved Link Manager and calendar, geographic data support and better image uploads. Mullenweg said it had been tested more thoroughly than any earlier version. It was available from SourceForge.
- Installer fixes: The installer now checked for wp-config.php and whether WordPress was already installed. Dougal Campbell made login cookies unique to each site, so several WordPress installs could share a domain.
- Post and Edit split (October 27): The writing screen now showed only the new-post form, and a separate Edit menu listed recent posts and comments. Mullenweg described both changes together.
- Configurable permalinks: A new options screen let users build a URL structure from year, month, day and a cleaned-up post title. WordPress then generated the mod_rewrite rules to paste into .htaccess. Mullenweg first tried it on his own site on October 26.
Other WordPress News
- Cleaning up b2 posts: Mike Little shared an SQL query to remove the hard-coded break tags old b2 versions had saved into posts, now that autop handled line breaks.
- More importers: A Greymatter importer joined the admin, and Little added import of blogrolls from blo.gs on October 31.
- Spam-proofing addresses: Little wrapped admin and comment email addresses in the antispambot function to make them harder for spammers to harvest.
Security Alerts and Plugin Vulnerabilities
The team released 0.72 RC1 early because it fixed an important security vulnerability, and the final 0.72 announcement listed the fix first. Users of 0.71 and 0.711 were urged to upgrade. The public posts did not detail the bug. When the next public advisory came, in October 2004, the team noted that the previous one had been more than a year earlier.
Industry Trends and Insights
TypePad’s arrival in October meant the best-known name in self-hosted blogging now offered a paid hosted service. WordPress was going the other way, adding features that rewarded people who ran their own server, such as rewrite-based permalinks. Clean, readable URLs were becoming a selling point, and Mark Pilgrim had already argued for them in his writing on permalink “slugs.”
Theme of the Month: Dave Shea Default Template
The template in 0.72 came from Dave Shea of mezzoblue, best known for the CSS Zen Garden. Having a respected standards designer create the default look matched WordPress’s pitch of valid, CSS-driven markup. It was also a sign that the web design community was starting to notice the project.
Founder of the Month: Dave Shea
Dave Shea was not a WordPress developer, but his contribution reached every new 0.72 install. The CSS Zen Garden had shown designers what CSS layouts could do. Bringing that approach to WordPress’s default template helped persuade standards-minded bloggers that the project took design seriously.
Looking Ahead to November 2003
The new permalink structure was in CVS only, and users who wanted to try it had to run the upgrade script in wp-admin. Mullenweg said it would be developed much further before reaching a release. Next it needed to be used everywhere WordPress built links, including archives, feeds and comments.