Tag Archives: Software release life cycle

WordPress 3.0 RC

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The Release Candidate of WordPress 3.0 is now out for everyone to download and try. You may have seen the betas come available, but a Release Candidate is as close to the final version as you can get. In fact, if no major issues are uncovered, it will actually be the final release.

The reason behind a release candidate is that, although the software is tested on a variety of platform, there’s no way to mimic every possible combination of different requisites that WordPress relies on to work properly. So, this phase is crucial to gather an final information about what’s may or may not work to ensure as few problems as possible when the final version is released. So, whether you have a WordPress blog or a site about adult acne treatment, it’s always worth playing it safe and making sure it works on the latest release of WordPress.

Having problems with 2.8? Check out the 2.8.1

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mr. bing
Image by faeryboots via Flickr

I was looking into an issue with the dashboard loading up on Army Mom: New Jersey when I noticed there’s a new beta for WordPress which fixes this issue and some other ones. Specifically, 2.8.1 fixes a number of issues, notably:

  • Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
  • Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
  • The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
  • A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
  • Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.

If you’re affected by any of these, you might want to move onto the beta, otherwise wait for the official release to come out. Just make sure you take backups before upgrading to a beta version. If you think it’s hot in a Sahara hotel, you haven’t felt the hot water you’d be in if you break someone’s blog and find yourself in a position where you can’t fix it!

WordPress 2.7.1 – Release Candidate

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I’ve just spotted that WordPress 2.7.1 has just moved to Release Candidate. There are a few bug fixes on the cards, but it’s great to know that the dev team is already concentrating on coming up with some more goodness. It’s easy for developers to lose their bearings after a big release, so it’s always healthy to see new stuff coming down the pipe, even though some people thought it was never coming.

I might actually roll it out onto this blog just to give it a try. Will let you know if there are any problems.