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For those of you who have been downloading the nightly builds or contributing code to 2.7, you’ve noticed how quickly features are being added, small layout changes are gradually being implemented, and the application is morphing before your very eyes. For the most part, the response has been extremely positive, but even the people who love 2.7 have been wondering what it’s going to end up looking like. Though 2.7 is still a work in progress, we’ve put together a set of wireframes to illustrate how we think it will all turn out, so you can take a look under the hood of the design process, so to speak.

The PDF attached to this post outlines the navigation model, header elements, and important screens such as the dashboard, the new post screen, and list screens for posts, comments, and media.

Some things to bear in mind if you’re not used to looking at wireframes:

1. These are a guide, not a dictate. Changes may be made by developers and designers as needed for technical, aesthetic and/or usability reasons. When you have a team of superfast developers like we do, sometimes wireframes can become out of date quickly. In the two hours since these wireframes were approved, for example, already there are a few things that have moved and a menu change or two. Tweaks will continue to be made over the next week or two before freeze. This is Alpha software, not Beta, and it’s not static. That’s part of what makes it exciting, that every time it’s updated there’s something new.

2. These are all black/grey/white. That’s because we have a designer hard at work on visual styles for the new admin panel, including color palette, fonts, graphic elements, etc. When we have a new look to show off, we will. For now, the wireframes are “lookless” on purpose.

3. Not every screen is wireframed. We focused on creating wireframes for those screens that are undergoing the most change. For screens retaining largely the same functionality and layout, we have not included wireframes. In some cases, we’ll be updating screens but haven’t decided how to do it yet, so those aren’t included either.

4. Some elements apply directly to wordpress.com or wordpress.org, so don’t be alarmed if you see something that doesn’t seem to apply (like multiple dashboards).

One of the things I love best about WordPress is the vibrant community full of talented developers and designers who care about the application and want it to be the best it can be. Despite the overwhelmingly positive response we’ve gotten when showing 2.7 at WordCamps and from the majority of the community, there will always be people who would prefer it to be structured another way, which is why we love plugins! The decisions that went into 2.7 were based on a combination of usability testing results from 2.5 and Crazyhorse (both including laser eye tracking, official report to be released soon, but slides from WordCamp SF available in meantime), community feedback, personal and professional opinions, and some thinking about where the next couple of versions will be going in terms of new features, so that we will have a design that scales to accommodate some the features we hope to incorporate in the future.

So, I hope you enjoy getting an inside look at how we’ve been organizing our thoughts around 2.7, and that when the community feedback starts flowing everyone remembers that we all want the same thing: the best WordPress possible.

Another round of mini-mockups and multiple choice questions awaits the first 5000 respondents. WordPress 2.7 UI Survey #2 is now available to take your opinions regarding:

• Where to put the search box
• Where to put the Add New Post button/favorites menu
• How to label the Future Publish/Edit Timestamp function

The survey (hosted by the good guys over at PollDaddy.com) will automatically close after receiving 5000 responses, which only took about two days for the navigation survey, so hurry over and cast your votes.

Note: when the survey has closed, these links will be disabled and this post will be updated.

WordPress 2.7 is currently in development and as some people already know, it features a revised layout with a left-hand navigation column that was designed in response to user feedback regarding the use of screen real estate. Because the navigation came straight from the Crazyhorse prototype that was developed quickly for usability testing, it is still a work in progress.

Navigation sections and labels are being decided now, and as usual there are lots of good ideas floating around. As part of the mission to increase user involvement in design decisions, we’ve created a survey intended to give WordPress users the ability to play a part in deciding how the navigation options should be grouped and labeled. If you use WordPress and want to add your opinion, take the survey.

WordPress 2.7 Navigation Options Survey

Stefan Esser recently warned developers of the dangers of SQL Column Truncation and the weakness of mt_rand().  With his help we worked around these problems and are now releasing WordPress 2.6.2.  If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade.  With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password.  The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit.  However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.  Stefan Esser will release details of the complete attack shortly.  The attack is difficult to accomplish,  but its mere possibility means we recommend upgrading to 2.6.2.

Other PHP apps are susceptible to this class of attack.  To protect all of your apps, grab the latest version of Suhosin.  If you’ve already updated Suhosin, your existing WordPress install is already protected from the full exploit.  You should still upgrade to 2.6.2 if you allow open user registration so as to prevent the possibility of passwords being randomized.

2.6.2 also contains a handful of bug fixes.  Check out the full changeset and list of changed files.

With 2.6.1, we’re continuing our trend of releasing a maintenance release shortly after a major release in order to get fixes for the inevitable “dot zero” bugs into your hands without a long wait.  If you’re happy with 2.6, however, keep on using it.  You need not upgrade to 2.6.1 if 2.6 is getting the job done.

2.6.1 offers several improvements for international users.  Styling of the admin for right-to-left languages is much improved thanks to the efforts of the Farsi and Hebrew translation teams, and a mysterious gettext bug caused by certain PHP configurations is now fixed.  For IIS users, 2.6.1 fixes several permalink problems. Image insertion problems in the Press This feature experienced by IE users are also fixed. Of note to everyone is a fix for a performance bug in the admin where those with a lot of plugins would experience slowness on some pages.

Check out the full list of over 60 fixes to see if 2.6.1 has something to offer you.   A full diff and list of changed files is also available.  Download 2.6.1 and enjoy.

It’s been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes. Since then most theme authors have been distributing their themes from their own sites, without a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes. With the success of the plugins directory, we’ve wanted to have those same benefits in a theme directory. Today is the day we start making that happen, with the introduction of wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

Bringing the new theme directory under the WordPress “extend” umbrella allowed us to take advantage of all the infrastructure that has already been built up to support WordPress.org. If you’ve browsed through the plugin directory, you’ll feel right at home in the new theme directory.

We’ve gone through great lengths to make this as painless as possible for theme authors. You don’t need to know anything about Subversion (our back end magic takes care of all that for you), just login with your WordPress.org username and password and go to the upload page. From there you upload your regular theme zip file and we take care of the rest.

Once you upload your new theme we do a few automated checks for some of the requirements for each theme. If we find one that you missed we’ll provide you an error and description of what needs to be fixed. When a theme upload has been accepted we’ll send you an email and put it in the queue to be reviewed, to make sure we didn’t miss anything. After the theme has been approved you’ll get another email letting you know that the theme is now live.

That catches you up to where we’re at today. When you finish that theme you’ve been slaving over, upload it to the new directory and let us know what you think. Since so much has changed since the old theme directory we’re starting fresh from zero. If you’ve got specific questions or suggestions contact us and we’ll do our best to get them answered.

If you’re new to php, or would like to try a system that allows you to generate code quickly, or just don’t like to reinvent the wheel to get some fast work done, look into using a php framework.

Take a look at http://www.fiforms.org/. This “framework” can be used to generate data entry screens onto MySQL, and friends have recommended it as ‘good’. It is more like a collection of classes as opposed to a full blown framework, but it does the job. The documentation is good and most of all it is open source and free.

I expect to be trying it out soon myself, and will post a blog item as soon as I have something to say one way or the other.

I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

We’ve prepared a brief video tour of 2.6, if you have 3 minutes and 29 seconds to spare, it’s worth a watch:

If you’d like to embed the tour video in your blog, copy and paste this code for the high quality version:

<embed src="http://v.wordpress.com/mARhRBcT/fmt_dvd" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="385" flashvars="blog_domain=http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26/&width=640&height=385"> </embed>

And here’s a smaller version, 400 pixels wide:

<embed src="http://v.wordpress.com/mARhRBcT/fmt_std" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="250" flashvars="blog_domain=http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26/&width=400&height=250"> </embed>

Here’s a more textual overview of what’s hawt in 2.6:

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

With the power of modern computers, it’s silly that we still use save and editing metaphors from the time when the most common method of storage was floppy disks. WordPress has always respected the importance of your writing with auto-save, and now we’re taking that to another level by allowing you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.

This is handy on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s super handy for multi-author blogs where you can see every change tracked by person.

Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

A few months ago on my blog we started a conversation about the posting bookmarklet in WordPress and which systems we should look to for inspiration, like Flock, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and Delicious. From these suggestions and the Quick Post plugin by Josh Kenzer, we developed a Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog:

For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. On my blog I’ve been experimenting with using different categories and the in_category() function — such as video, quote, aside, et cetera — to create a more tumblelog-like format.

Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging

Gears is an open source browser extension project started by Google that developers like us can use to give you features we wouldn’t normally be able to. There are a lot of things we can do with Gears in the future, but in this release we’ve stuck to using what’s called a “Local Server” to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WordPress works just fine without it, you just get a little extra juice when you have it installed.

Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing mistakes development.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Developer Notes

WordPress.org had over 75 people contributing code to WordPress 2.6. In addition to the core commit team we had contributions from Dion Hulse, Austin Matzko, Otto42, Benedict Eastaugh, and pishmishy. AaronCampbell and Marco Zehe provided more than a few patches. Back among the top code contributors is Jacob Santos. Alex Concha continues to have WordPress’ back. Joining bug reporting and gardening elite are hakre, Simon Wheatley, mtekk, and Matty Rob. Finally, congratulations to our Peter Westwood on your recent wedding! I’m also proud to announce we’re adding a new core committer to the team: Andrew Ozz (azaozz) has been a huge help to the core team this year, particularly around TinyMCE and making the WYSIWYG something that works for you, not against you.

Because of the new capabilities to make WordPress a clean SVN checkout, plugin and theme authors should do their best to handle forms and posts through WP rather than trying to post to their files directly, here’s a quick Codex article about how to do it using our forward-compatible APIs.

Upgrading

2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade. Our standard 3-step upgrade instructions apply to this release. There were at least 1,984,047 downloads of the 2.5 series, the fastest growing release we’ve ever had, and I think all of those people will find 2.6 adds a level of polish that really makes WP a pleasure to use every day. (At least I do. :))

Easter Egg

There have been rumors and allegations that there was a so-called “easter egg” added to 2.6 early in its development. These rumors and allegations are completely false!

For those of you that use Google Mail - GMail to most - there’s a feature that lets you  create a change to your email address on the fly and while still having have the email sent to your base email address.

Why would you want to do this? Many reasons. You can track promotions, track a variety of listings on Craigslist without having to ask a person making a query ‘which ad are you responding to?’, and even use a variation to sign up for a newsletter or other list and see whether they resell your email address.

How to do it? Move the period in your gmail to to wherever you wish, or even add one if you
dont have a period in it. Or, ad add the ” + ” sign to the end of your email address and add something to the end. if you are signing up for amazon.com, you can do “your.email+amazon@gmail.com<your.email%2Bamazon@gmail.com>” so that if your email gets sold, you know who sold it. for more info, follow the link below.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html

I admit that for most of my domain registrations I use GoDaddy. While many don’t like the user interface because it is too ‘noisy’ and full of bright colors and images of women in tank tops, I don’t really care that much either way. In a sense, it is a bit like the old Charlie’s Angels TV show. It was too full of jiggling, but on the other hand it was one of the first television shows which focused on women as the lead characters. So for me, as a young feminist, I liked the show.

GoDaddy is like the 800 lb gorilla in the room. It does domain registrations quickly and inexpensively. I buy a lot of registrations so I pay for their discount plan, and I am able to manage a large number of domains well through their interface.

However, if you want to send bulk email you can get shut down by GoDaddy in a heartbeat. They then keep your domain name and won’t let you get it back without a huge fight. Some would find that to be a good thing, but others find their policies draconian and difficult to follow reliably.

If you’re looking for other domain registrars, here are two more you can consider that are recommended by programmer friends of mine:

• Yahoo Small Business - http://www.dyndns.org
• NameCheap - http://www.namecheap.com

These services are also reasonably priced. Their interfaces are very different from GoDaddy, and you can get special prices from time to time.