Apostolos Dountsis

WordPress 2.1 has been released and apparently if you are a WP developer you will love this release. The release announcement states:

“Developers will especially love this release, as it has much cleaner code than 2.0 and includes hundreds of enhancements that will enable a new generation of richer plugins. Here’s a taste of some of the things included:

• Psuedo-cron functionality let’s you schedule events much like cron.
• Users admin can now comfortably handle hundreds of thousands of users.
• The new WP_Error class cleans up how we do error reporting and handling.
• The javascript loader makes it easier for plugins to include rich functionality.
• Tons of new hooks and APIs.
• We’ve started to fill out our code inline documentation.
• Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins.
• Custom header, color picker, and image cropping framework.”

Cron jobs, error reporting, javascript advanced functionality, new hooks, image and thumbnail API! I am sure that you will agree that all this is very exciting and I hear you asking: Where is the link with all the documentation regarding these new features? Well… there is no documentation, no further explanation.

The documentation section of WordPress.org was last updated on December 3rd and that minor modification does not constitute a proper update. Also, the developer’s documentation has not been updated to cover all these bells and whistles of WP 2.1. Wouldn’t be really helpful if there was a list of changes that plugin developers could use as a reference to make their plugins 2.1 compatible?

One of the ‘tastes’ in the release is the inline documentation. A link to that does exist but if you read again the sentence it says “We’ve started to fill…”.

Until now, I have noticed one developer’s gotcha in WordPress 2.1 but I am sure that more will follow. A page is declared differently in WP2.1 than in WP2.0. To be more precise, in WP2.0 a post was defined as a page if the post_status in WP_POSTS was set to ’static’. This is no longer the case in WP2.1 as the field post_type is now used in the table WP_POSTS and can have one of the two values: ‘post’ or ‘page’. The post_status does not use the value ’static’ but the value is set to ‘open’ for published pages. Do not get me wrong, this is how it should have been from the day that pages appeared in WP. However, any theme or plugin that deals with pages will be more or less broken. This change was mentioned by Aaron in December in the development blog, but if you missed the post then you are on your own.

As a developer, I say: If you want me to love this release then give me some useful documentation with it.

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