WordPress 2.9 update on Semiomantics

Word­Press 2.9 has been released just a few hours ago. This post details the impact of this most recent update on Semi­oman­tics Scripts.

The first big change con­cerns server requirements:

Word­Press 2.9 Requires MySQL 4.1.2 or greater (old require­ment was 4.0).

Semi­oman­tics Consulting

*  Trash sta­tus for posts, pages, and com­ments (includes restore and per­ma­nent delete)
* Add sup­port for ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ to (Gallery Short­code)
* Allow user reg­is­tra­tion to be enabled by an XMLRPC client
* Add sup­port for sticky posts to the WXR exporter and importer
* ‘rel=canonical’ for sin­gu­lar pages
* Scroll back to the same loca­tion after sav­ing a file in the Plu­gin and Theme edi­tors
* Cor­rect com­ments and remove unnec­es­sary echos from the default themes side­bar tem­plate file
* Enable the APP (Atom) attach­ment file down­load to work cor­rectly
* Sup­port loca­tion of cat­e­gory tem­plates based on ‘category-slug’ as well as ‘category-id’ (Ticket 10614)
* Sup­port loca­tion of tag tem­plates based on ‘tag-id’ as well as ‘tag-slug’ (Ticket 10868)
* Sup­port loca­tion of page tem­plates based on ‘page-slug’ and ‘page-id’
* Set “Allow my blog to appear in search engines” to checked in instal­la­tion
* Don’t offer to make a cat­e­gory its own par­ent
* Remove Sphere from search list
* Minify admin CSS
* Show cor­rect max upload file­size error mes­sage
* Add ‘rel’ attribute to next/previous post links
* Make the default and clas­sic themes com­ment textar­eas valid XHTML
* Clean up ‘.but­ton’ and ‘.button[disabled]’ CSS classes, add ‘spin­ner’ and ‘gray-out’ but­tons after click­ing Pub­lish or Update post
* Fix race con­di­tion with autosave when click­ing Pub­lish imme­di­ately after enter­ing post title
* Add Com­ments for Pages in the Word­Press Default theme
* Define ‘$content_width’ for Kubrick
* Bet­ter feed­back on pub­lish­ing of future posts and pages
* Dis­play com­ments in descend­ing date order, con­sis­tently
* Add means of auto­mat­i­cally repair­ing tables
* Press This book­marklet fixes
* Give plu­g­ins and themes sim­ple con­trol over the text dis­played at the end of an auto­gen­er­ated Excerpt
* Don’t show “Change Perma­links” but­ton when edit­ing the page set as “Front page“
* Image edit­ing
* Retire Bun­ny­Tags importer
* Retire Jerome’s key­words importer
* Explain that the perma­link is tem­po­rary for autosave gen­er­ated perma­links
* Update Sim­plePie to 1.2
* Elim­i­nate the redun­dant and con­fus­ing com­ment thread­ing depth of 1
* Eas­ier Embeds with oEm­bed sup­port (see Ticket #10337) (oEm­bed dis­cov­ery dis­abled by default, use plu­gin to enable it)
* TinyMCE 3.2.7
* Remove rel=‘tag’ on links in Tag Clouds
* Add a title to the Home link out­put by wp_page_menu()
* Adjust com­ment mod­er­a­tion key­board short­cut keys ‘d = trash’ or delete depend­ing on the screen
* Show “Draft updated” instead of “Post updated” when sav­ing draft
* Show the login form in a popup when autosave hits the login grace period
* Open View/Preview post in a new win­dow from the link in the Saved/Updated mes­sage
* Sep­a­rate fields for ‘image alt’ and ‘image cap­tion’ in Media uploader
* Dis­play bet­ter infor­ma­tion about bro­ken themes when there is no stylesheet
* Improve sit­u­a­tion when tables such as wp_options table were ‘cor­rupt’ new instal­la­tion mes­sage was offered. Add means of auto­mat­i­cally repair­ing tables
* Export and import cus­tom tax­onomies
* Admin copy improve­ments
* Don’t show page tem­plates in the drop down if they are in a sub­di­rec­tory
* Make codex link open in a new win­dow
* Change ‘Remove’ link on wid­gets to ‘Delete’ because it doesn’t just remove it, it deletes the set­tings for that wid­get instance.

* Added ‘excerpt_more’ fil­ter to wp_trim_excerpt() func­tion, which allow devel­op­ers to change excerpt ‘[…]’ more string (Ticket 10395)
* Add ‘smilies_src’ fil­ter so plu­g­ins can bet­ter add smi­lies
* Canon­i­cal redi­rects for post name queries
* Allow _wp_get_comment_list() to han­dle cus­tom com­ment types
* Return an empty array instead of false for get_children() when no chil­dren found
* Add some fil­ters so that HTTP requests can be fil­tered
* Move plu­gin update notice out­put to the plu­gin spe­cific hook
* Limit wp-mail ‘blog by email’ checks to every 5 min­utes
* Make it much eas­ier to fil­ter con­tact meth­ods from user pro­files
* Allow fil­ter­ing of get_edit_post_link for cus­tom post_type
* ‘get_sample_permalink_html’ fil­ter
* Enforce acti­va­tion key to be a string, reject acti­va­tion keys that are arrays
* Sup­port for new post types
* Respect cus­tom post_type in queries
* Send Retry-After header when in main­te­nance mode
* Var­i­ous WP Filesys­tem related fixes and doc­u­men­ta­tion
* Add con­stants for ftp con­nec­tions time­outs
* Increase time­out on cron-based requests when check­ing for upgrades
* Don’t use has_action() before do_action() in http.php
* Speed up jQuery based scripts
* Use the cur­rent user as author for autosave
* Show My Posts as default view on the Edit Posts screen for users with­out ‘edit_others_posts’ cap
* Ensure that drafts viewed over XMLRPC have a cor­rect gmt date set
* Pass user id to ‘get_’ the_author_meta fil­ters
* Move _wp_get_user_contactmethods() into the reg­is­tra­tions func­tions file
* Machine parseable db error codes
* Add global JS vars and actions to the media uploader iframe
* Add JSON com­pat for PHP < 5.2
* Make option_name the pri­mary key for the options table
* Allow a plu­gin to do a com­plete takeover of Post by Email
* Log­a­rith­mic scale for tag cloud
* Pass Post ID to the ‘get_comments_number’ fil­ter
* Always fil­ter the url in the media upload form
* Add a ‘the_terms’ fil­ter
* is_blog_installed() improve­ments
* Allow force_ssl_admin() to prop­erly accept false as a value
* Pass logged_in cookie to async-upload and fil­ter the cookie scheme in auth_redirect()
* Add more actions around data­base add/delete/update oper­a­tions
* php­Doc for wp_“check|set“_post_lock func­tions
* Use the old strings which are more trans­la­tor friendly and add a generic default string to aid re-use by plu­g­ins adding post_types
* Fil­ter fields through kses upon dis­play and intro­duce sanitize_user_object() and sanitize_user_field()
* Use null instead of 0 when set­ting con­tent length
* Include ‘hid­den’ direc­to­ries in filesys­tem dirlist by default
* Pass args array to ‘wp_list_pages’ fil­ter
* Actions for tax­on­omy updates
* Key should be ‘comment_id’ not ‘post_id’ in com­ments table
* Add get_delete_post_link () to retrieve delete posts link for post
* Add ‘sep­a­ra­tor’ para­me­ter to wp_tag_cloud() and wp_generate_tag_cloud() func­tions (Ticket 10315)
* Added add_comment_meta() fam­ily of func­tions
* Use a post_parent of 0 instead of –1 to indi­cate unat­tached posts
* Improve get_page_hierarchy() func­tion
* Dep­re­cate the_content_rss(), add the_content_feed() and get_the_content_feed(). Con­vert places that called the_content_rss() with an excerpt length to the_excerpt_rss(). Remove the rss_excerpt_length option. Use the_content_feed() where the_content() was pre­vi­ously used in feeds.
* Add ‘pad_counts’ argu­ment to wp_dropdown_categories()
* Remove code­press
* Remove the php-gettext library
* Canon­i­cal post thum­ban­ils
* Add a fil­ter to the_author_posts_link()
* Merge post.js with page.js and slug.js, opti­mize cat­e­gories and tags JS, stan­dard­ize post­boxes IDs and JS
* Intro­duce register_theme_directory() which takes a wp-content-relative path and will addi­tion­ally scan it for themes. Plu­g­ins can use this to add themes with­out requir­ing copy­ing by the user
* Add set_user_role action hook
* Allow theme devs to change attrs (like CSS class) of thumb­nail images
* Add wp-post-image CSS class to post images
* Allow for plu­g­ins to enhance the num­ber of meta­data fields cap­tured from plu­gin and theme head­ers
* Merge updated pomo code
* Switch to using NOOP_Translations for untrans­lated sites
* Improve wptex­tur­ize per­for­mance
* Pro­vide con­text to the strings in the Plu­gin and Theme installers to allow for dif­fer­ent gram­mat­i­cal gen­der
* Fixes for theme sub­dir sup­port
* Intro­duce wp_kses_post() and wp_kses_data() for fil­ter­ing unescaped data
* Add ‘orderby=comment_count’ argu­ment to query_posts()
* Honor Post Type for Sticky Posts
* Allow query­ing mul­ti­ple post types
* Intro­duce add_theme_support(feature) and current_theme_supports(feature) for announc­ing and check­ing theme sup­port for var­i­ous fea­tures
* Intro­duce require_if_theme_supports()
* Add num­ber of Embed related fil­ters
* Add ‘IMAGE_EDIT_OVERWRITE’ con­stant to con­trol edited image save or replace, most use­ful for setups that have dynamic image resiz­ing
* Add load_child_theme_textdomain() to allow child themes to have their own trans­la­tion files
* Add side­bar descrip­tions to side­bar set­tings and wid­get admin screen
* Make option_id pri­mary. Add uniques for option_name and autoload
* Allow plu­g­ins to over­ride the behav­iour of load_textdomain() in a vari­ety of flex­i­ble ways
* Mark _c() as dep­re­cated. The new _x() func­tion should be used instead.
* Allow plu­g­ins to change the redi­rect on post/page publishing/submitting
* Stan­dard­ize on ‘user_id’ instead of ‘user_ID’ when pass­ing com­ment data. Accept either ‘user_id’ or ‘user_ID’. Remove ‘user_id’ global.
* Fil­ter imported com­ments
* Intro­duc­ing set_post_image_size(w, h, crop) so themes can reg­is­ter their spe­cial size/crop for canon­i­cal post images
* Stan­dard­ize around “post image” instead of “post thumb­nail“
* Allow reg­is­ter­ing post image sup­port per post type
* Return false from is_paged() if on the first page.
* Check MySQL and PHP ver­sions when auto upgrad­ing
* Add required php and mysql ver­sions to version.php
* Hard code required ver­sion in update-core.php

All Semi­oman­tics Themes will run on the WP 2.9 back­bone. You will not notice any visual or vis­i­ble dif­fer­ence except if you are hosted on out­dated MySQL soft­ware; in such a case we rec­om­mend to either not update or to move the blog to a host ful­fill­ing the appro­pri­ate server require­ments. (See above: Server Require­ments -  our Sug­ges­tion remains ChiHosters).

The new ver­sion of Word­Press allows for bet­ter han­dling of child themes where available.

The WP 2.9 ver­sion pro­vides new options for opti­miza­tion and mod­i­fies some of the fea­tures we have over­writ­ten in the past for opti­mized per­for­mance. Also, as some of the hooks for plu­g­ins have changed, which will allow us to enhance our per­for­mance with spe­cial add-on scripts.

The Semi­oman­tics seman­tic SEO engine 5.2 will replace the present ver­sion 5.1 on high per­for­mance cus­tomer sites.

Semi­oman­tics script updates will be avail­able shortly; please observe our next few posts where we will detail the upgrades.

• add com­ments wordpress
• word­press 2 9 requirements
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