As the WordPress community eagerly awaits the final release of WordPress 3.0 it is always good news when you see positive reviews from Alex King, the WordPress innovator with plugins like the widely used Twitter Tools, the Carrington theme framework, and the WordPress ShareThis plugin, on how things progressed. This is also pretty re-assuring as this is essentially the first comprehensive code review of this type that they have done for the upcoming version.
At the moment WordPress is going through a major transition from version 2.0 released in December 24th 2005 to WordPress 3.0 Beta and 3.0 final scheduled for release in May 2010 according to WPDevel.
For those who have seen the gradual ascent of WordPress into the platform it is now, as the 2009 Packt Open Source CMS of the year, it is no longer just a “blogging script” but a leader in the Open Source PHP CMS game. Hence the particular interest in the eagerly awaited, and highly anticipated release.
Wordpress 3.0 Code Review completed
On another post i did note the malware currently attacking the WordPress as a whole, all the way up to installs of the current WordPress version 2.9 released on Dec 19th 2009.
Working with software and Open Source Web platforms as long as i have is that, the game played between developers and hackers is almost as tactical and calculated as the modern-day game between search engines and SEO professionals.
It is a constant battle to remain in front, luckily with platforms such as WordPress that have a millions of users, developers, and testers, so security patches are usually released with greater frequency than “closed source” products.
Some of the points addressed at the review were:
- Differences between the current 2.9 and upcoming 3.0 branches
- Code review of the wp-admin directories
- Partial review of wp-includes directories
- Testing of a number of plugins using 3.0 development sites
Undoubtedly it is only the start, but sessions like this will help a lot considering the size of the WordPress community, and with more testing it will mean fewer bugs and hiccups as we all move to a new version.
One thing of i did find of interest is the fact that there was a lot of core functionality based on the WordPress MU fork. Personally, I did not find this too surprising as WordPress MU was fork of the original WordPress version and the progression was eventually bound to be circular in nature. Especially when you consider the advent of social networking and growth of community, and geolcation based services, the natural progression was a more community, multi-site, multi-user structure.
What did interest me was how current plugins built for the standard distribution would hold up? This was something we actually discussed over at WPBeginner (comments section) but so far things seem to be going as smooth as can be expected.
It is also remember that a lot of the active core WordPress developers have other permanent jobs and commitments so being able to have a comprehensive code review like this, at such a critical point, towards the release of 3.0 is even more important.