I’m very happy to kick off the 1.2 beta cycle tonight. In many ways version 1.2 represents the largest step forward since the inception of WordPress. It’s been a bit over a month since the last version—1.0.2—was released, but the 1.2 branch has been under development since mid-January. Because of the heavy changes to the codebase we have had a prolonged “alpha” period where we worked out some of the basic issues with timezones, unicode, and the new options interface. Here’s a sampling of what 1.2 offers:
- Sub-categories
- Custom fields
- Localization framework and unicode encoding support
- All post times stored in local time and GMT
- Cleaner cruft-free and search engine friendly URLs
- Automatic thumbnail creation
- Strong encryption of user passwords
- Redone administration interface, particularly with regard to options
- Non-mod_rewrite clean links option
And there’s much more. Writing release notes is going to be one of the hardest things about 1.2. The days leading up to the final release are going to be spent updating our documentation, fleshing out wordpress.org to showcase the new plugin architecture, and of course squashing any bugs that may come to light.
As always, testing and feedback in the beta forum is very much appreciated. The beta packages are available in the usual place.