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100,000 downloads of WordPress 2.7 in 20 hours, and the pace is picking up.

We’ve been working our asses off and finally have a beta to share.  Download, test, and enjoy the pretty visuals.  The word most people use when first seeing it is “sexy”.   This is a great design, and I’m very pleased with how it has turned out.  When the visuals are complete and the new icons are in, 2.7 will be a very good looking release.

Try this exercise.  Load up the Write Post page in 2.6 and in 2.7.   Compare the location of the title field between the two.  Notice the vertical distance.  That’s one of my favorite 2.7 features.

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WP’s automatic upgrade can be used to automatically upgrade to betas and nightly builds for the development branch or the latest stable branch.  To get onto a development upgrade path you must first make a small change to wp-includes/version.php.

The current release of WP is 2.8.  If you peek in the version.php file, you will see this:

$wp_version = ‘2.8′;

If you would like to try out the latest development builds for the upcoming 2.8.1 release, change that line to this:

$wp_version = ‘2.8.1-dev’;

“dev” can be any string. The presence of a suffix on the version tells the automatic upgrade to put you on…

2.7.1, the first 2.7 maintenance release, is almost ready.  So far, 66 tickets are fixed in 2.7.1.  There are another 50 tickets open against the 2.7.1 milestone, but most of those will be moved to 2.7.2 or 2.8.  If there are tickets in that list you would really like to see fixed in 2.7.1, drop a comment.

To automatically upgrade from 2.7 to 2.7.1 Beta 1, change the version in your wp-includes/version.php file from 2.7 to 2.7.1-beta and then visit Tools->Upgrade.  Otherwise, download the beta package and install manually.

Finally, at last, it’s here.  And now, on to 2.8.  There were several areas that we didn’t have time to re-design for 2.7.  2.8 will focus on making the media and widgets UI as good as the rest of WP.  There will be a few new features as well.  Theme browsing and one-click theme install is a likely one.  After a short rest to recover from 2.7, we’ll start brainstorming new features and put the results on the 2.8 codex page.

We’ll likely do the usual .1 release in a month to address any bugs that slipped through the 2.7 beta…

As announced on the wordpress.com blog, 2.7 is coming to wordpress.com tomorrow.  Actually, 2.7 has been running on wordpress.com for awhile, just not the exciting new admin UI.  Here’s a peek at what the admin will look like on wordpress.com.

The final release of 2.7 won’t be here until next week. There is still a lot of coordination and management type stuff to do before we’re ready to release.

Implementation of the new visual design of WordPress 2.7 is almost done.  One of our primary objectives with the new design is to offer interface flexibility and customization.  You can drag-and-drop and show or hide many UI elements.  Here’s the Write Post page stripped down the way I like it.  Title, Content, Categories, and Publish.  That’s all I use and now that’s all I have to see.  Even the navigation is tucked away on the left so I can concentrate on writing.

2.7.1 is out, improving upon a solid 2.7 release.

The next version of the iPhone app is almost out and features comment moderation.

2.8 is well underway.  So far there have been lots of script loading and DB performance improvements.  The first cut of the theme installer is in, and the redesign of the Widgets admin UI is beginning.  Custom tag taxonomies now have some built-in admin UI,  and proper timezone and DST support is available if you are running PHP 5.

A major release segues right into bug fixing for the first maintenance release.  You can follow what is being fixed for 2.7.1 here.  So far there are five small fixes.

This weekend will go down in history. It’s the first time I’ve been seriously sick in well over 5 years. A bug infected my son on Wednesday, but he got over it quickly enough. Then the same bug hit my wife and I on Sunday morning and we’re just getting over it now.

Odd that a worm attacks software I work on and I get very sick at the same time. Unfortunately I couldn’t run an exploit scanner and remove the bug but my body’s defenses took care of the bugs eventually.

All this leads me to a handy little plugin called…

RSSCloud support has been enabled on all WordPress.com blogs. If you are running a WordPress.org powered blog you can do the same thing with the RSSCloud plugin.

So what does this really mean?

From the point of view of WordPress and this plugin there are three main additions:

Adds the <cloud> element to your RSS2 feed (more details here and here) which tells clients where and how to sign up for notification requests.
Registers a URL handler with WordPress to process the notification signups.
Sends out notification updates when a new post is published.

The cloud element looks like this:

<cloud domain=’josephscott.org’ port=’80′…

I have a role to write articles, someone else has a role to look over it and edit and deem as feasible for reading, but what does the role I have mean?

Meta: Words or phrases marked in italic will be explained in future posts.

You have a role of doing something wherever you are at or at whichever position you are, those roles are pre-defined and involve certain things that you can do and cannot do, some times we do break rules, however with software we usually cannot.

Likewise with WordPress there are some roles that are pre-defined and have certain capabilities that you…

RSS Cloud support has been turned on for WordPress.com and you can download a plugin for WordPress.org. Both are first iterations and will continue to be improved over the next few weeks, and I’ll be at the RSS Cloud meetup on Wednesday.

New Plugins

Post Videos and Photo Galleries

Post videos and photo galleries plugin is a professional tool for webmasters and bloggers to add streaming videos, image galleries and music playlists to their site, it includes uploading, transcoding/resizing, a selection of players and media hosting on a dedicatedstreaming servers at cincopa.com.

BuddyPress Author Exposed

Display metadata about post author: name, email, website, and BuddyPress profile.

Post Views Dashboard

Post Views Summary is a dashboard plugin that shows the 10 most and least visited posts and pages. (Page in German)

User Messages

A plugin to facilitate communication between your users.

HTML Page Sitemap

Adds an HTML (Not XML) sitemap of your…