WordPress 2.1 has been released.
The major features according to the WordPress.org site are:
* Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
* Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
* The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
* Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
* New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
* You can set any “page� to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
* Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
* Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
* Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
* More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
* Pages can now be drafts, or private.
* Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
* The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
* Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
* Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
* The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
* A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.
2.1 also includes over 550 bug fixes.
Installation and upgrading instructions are provided. Follow them closely.
You can download it here .
The next version of WordPress - version 2.1 is to be released later today and Aaron Brazell has a good post outlining 10 features of WordPress 2.1 you should be aware of.
One that I love is the AutoSave feature. I have lost several posts during writing which I wouldn’t have lost if I had this feature. Another is the upgrade tool - that’s right, WordPress 2.1 on installation will automatically upgrade your previous installation making the whole installation process that much easier, it seems.
Looking forward to giving 2.1 a whirl!
The presentations I gave to Microsoft Belgium this morning went really well and I received tremendously positive feedback. I have been asked not to talk about the content of the talks so I can’t say anymore about those.
I met some cool people there. Dave and Tom organised the event, and ran it really smoothly, despite Aer Lingus’ attempts to sabotage it by getting me there late!
I also caught up with Dirk (thanks for the ride from the airport) and Hans, both of whom I met originally in Burgenstock in September. And I met and had a great chat with Chris today at lunchtime. Chris uses WordPress.com so he can’t be all bad!!!
In my last post, I was wondering how to fix the issues people were having leaving comments on this site. Attempts to leave comments were timing out and the comments were not being posted.
Fortunately I had lots of great suggestions from readers on how to resolve the issues and I think it is now fixed (famous last words?).
The fix also seems to have had the knock-on effect of drastically speeding up the site - wohoo! A big thank you to everyone for your great suggestions.
The steps I took to resolve this were:
Of those changes, the last one (suggested by James (aka MacManX)) appeared to have the most dramatic positive effect. The site is now running way faster and comments seem to be posting successfully.
This site averages around 1750 unique visitors a day according to Awstats and about 3-4 times that according to Webalizer (Awstats strips out visits from robots/spiders/bots, etc.) so I am guessing that the comments were timing out because the site/server were under pressure.
Turning on the WordPress object cache took the pressure off and is now letting the comments through.
Sincere apologies to anyone who had problems recently leaving a comment on this site - hopefully it won’t happen again.
Comment issues on this site fixed?
A couple of people mentioned to me that they were having issues leaving comments once more on this site.
On the advice of Donncha (lead developer for WordPress.com), I installed wp-cache 2.0 on this blog along with Donncha’s own patch for it.
It certainly seems to have speeded up the blog - is anyone still having problems leaving comments?