WordPress trunk news #12

No WordPress 3.4 updates this week, and the WordPress 3.4 beta 3 version is currently available. As per project schedule, the final two steps before WordPress 3.4 are release candidates RC1 and RC2. Target launch is May 9th.

At the time of writing, the WordPress 3.4 roadmap is at closed: 396 active: 92 total: 488 tickets, which is around 81% completed. Many XML-RPC privileges-type bugs fixed, we’ll probably be seeing more considering the terrific amount of new features in the XML-RPC server.

WordPress trunk news 12

And now to trunk, what’s changed?

Hopeless themes

changeset 20557

This changeset prevents themes with a missing stylesheet (style.css) to be visible in the built-in Theme Editor. Such themes are considered hopeless and are not eligible for editing anymore. Same goes for parent themes, these are checked, too, preventing children from being valid.

The requested theme does not exist. Stylesheet is missing.

It’s a pity that the Editors are still made available, though.

4-year old bug squished

changeset 20563

A bug that went unnoticed for around 4 years, since the introduction of default Gravatars has been caught, reported and patched. A missing ? prevented the size of the default Gravatar to be supplied.

Upgrade maintenance

changeset 20567

Tidying up of old files has been reviewed, many old versions covered where unneeded files after upgrade have to be deleted.

Multiple screenshots dropped

changeset 20590

Multiple screenshots was something probably many were looking forward to, however for now the functionality has been ripped out until further notice.

Uncluttered search UI

changeset 20592

WordPress Plugin/Theme Search UI

Notice anything different? Yep, the “Term”, “Author”, “Tag” dropdown is gone. The plugin search API already performs a weighted search and there is no need to specify the type of fields being searched apparently.

wp-register.php is out

changeset 20596

The wp-register.php file has been deprecated 6 years ago and now is the time to let go of it completely.

Faster load

changeset 20609

I personally get around 3000 spam comments a week and this proves to be quite a performance hog on some administration panel screens. This changeset fine-tunes how the latest comments are retrieved in order to make the dashboard faster.

Deprecated require_if_theme_supports

changeset 20610

require_if_theme_supports has been deprecated. Its functionality is very simple, it leverages the current_theme_supports function to require a file. The functionality can be re-implemented without any pain whatsoever if some of your code uses it.


That’s about it. See you soon.