Almost a month after the originally quoted release date, WordPress 2.2 has made it to a public release. Depending on how you look at it, this can be good or bad. While those that have a default installation may not need must customization, if any, some people will need to heavily modify the code to fit their current situations - myself included. Plugin authors have mostly gotten the kinks out over the last release, but the WordPress team has done something different this time. They’ve included a “Disable All Plugins” link from a recomendation of a user and have included a plugin functionality check. Basically, if a plugin isn’t going to work, you can’t activate it since WordPress will throw an error message stating: “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”
New User features in 2.2 include:
Atom 1.o feeds
Embedded Widget Support
Plugin compatibility checking
“Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.”
Developers face other issues with the following features: (Taken directly from the WP Blog)
- A new set of WordPress-specific XML-RPC APIs that allow for editing pages, setting categories, and much more.
- We now use jQuery for a number of internal functions, and hope to transition all of our JS to use it. (We still need volunteers for this.)
- Comment feeds now support multiple formats, including Atom.
- Our internal mail functions now use phpMailer, which allows for things like SMTP support.
- You can now set database collation and character set in your config file.
- You can also hardcode your site and WP URL in the config file, overriding the values in the DB.
- Finally we’ve increased the inline documentation of a number of functions inside of WP, which should help you navigate those parts of the code.
Unfortunately, I pulled a “young and stupid” mistake by not checking the release schedule before messing around with code. I am about to release a new blogging site (Post explaining it coming soon) and was just getting done with a lot of customizations when I find that WP 2.2 is now out. At least I didn’t release it only to find out that I would need to redo the whole thing when I upgraded.
I will openly admit that the upgrade went better than I had planned with no hiccups caused any frustration. The only main issue I had where that the core files got updated and I had to go through and update code, yet again.
