Those of you following the CVS may have noticed the flurry of activity in the past 48 hours. A lot of things have come together quickly, and here’s just a quick update of what’s happening:
- We’ve ironed out a few bugs with the excerpts functionality, it’s now 100%.
- WordPress Links — Mike has taken his excellent Links script and intergrated it with the WordPress architecture. It now has Weblogs.com and Blo.gs support, so it can be a complete drop-in replacement for Blogrolling or any other blogroll service. It also has some exciting new features which currently no other service offers. Best of all, it’s fast! Right now I’m working on an import tool which will allow this to import and export to OPML.
- Texturize — Texturize is a tool which intelligently fixes up plain text to be more typographically correct, this includes curly or smart quotes, em and en dashes, proper ellipsies, encdoded ampersands (for those pesky URLs), and a number of other things.
- Intelligent Line Breaks — Instead of “stupidly” putting a break at the end of every new line, this tool—which is enabled by default—creates paragraphs out of blocks of text, breaks where they are needed, and avoids putting breaks or paragraphs where there are already block-level tags.
- Default template — WordPress is now out of the box XHTML 1.1 compliant, though we send a XHTML 1.0 DOCTYPE to avoid compatibility issues. The new layout uses hack-free CSS that is easier than ever to customize.
- New administration interface — We’re making it as simple as possible, and no more. It should load faster and be more intuitive, and it’s only going to get better as we approach 1.0.
Basically the next few days we’re going to be wrapping things up and packaging them for a release. Stick around. I also need to update the dev blog with the latest version.