WordPress News Roundup September 2003: 0.72 Beta 2 Arrives and wordpress.org Plans a Hacks Section

September 2003 was spent testing and polishing. The second beta of WordPress 0.72 arrived on September 1 with the message that, unless new bugs appeared, it would become the final release. Meanwhile the project started organising the hacks that users had been trading on the forums, and Alex King became one of the most active committers.

WordPress Core Updates

• 0.72 Beta 2 (September 1): Mostly bug fixes, including a fix for the convert_chars problem that had been producing broken characters.
• Comment history in the admin: New admin screens listed recent comments across the whole site, so an old comment could be edited or deleted without first finding its post.
• Comment feeds and passwords (September 28): The RSS 2.0 comments feed, available for the whole site or one post, now respected password-protected posts, as did the pop-up comments page.
• Admin file renaming begins: King renamed several b2-era admin files with a wp- prefix and added navigation between the posts and comments sections. It was an early step in a cleanup that would finish in December.

Other WordPress News

• A curated hacks section (September 15): Alex King started building a WordPress-powered Hacks Section for wordpress.org. It would list tested hacks that followed the project’s published Hack Guidelines, and categories were being discussed in the forums. It was the first organised attempt to give WordPress an add-on library.
• Valid XHTML 1.1: On September 3, Mullenweg reported that the whole site and much of the forum were valid XHTML 1.1 and submitted wordpress.org to the X-Philes, a list of sites that served real XHTML.

Industry Trends and Insights

With no plugin API yet, extending a WordPress blog meant pasting code into core files, which was then lost on every upgrade. The Hacks Section and its guidelines were an attempt to bring order to that, and they showed demand for a proper extension system. That demand would lead to a my-hacks.php file in December and a full plugin architecture in 2004.

Founder of the Month: Alex King

Alex King made more commits than anyone else in September. He built the comment list in the admin and the password-aware comment feed, renamed files and improved admin navigation. He had already written the new quicktags and was now building the hacks section. King would go on to build some of the most widely used early plugins and run WordPress’s first design competition.

Looking Ahead to October 2003

Beta 2 was expected to become the final 0.72 release unless testers found serious bugs. The Hacks Section was still being built, with its categories under discussion in the forums.