On behalf of the entire WordPress team, I’m proud and excited to announce the immediate availability of variation 2.2 “Getz” for download. This reading includes a issue of new features, most notably Widgets integration, and exceeding two hundred bug fixes. It’s named in honor of sense saxophonist Stan Getz.

Goodies:

• WordPress Widgets consent to you to surely rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with potter-and-come by simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by fall short in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• comprehensive Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 exemplar spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is adept to cope with the latest version of Google’s Blogger merchandise and seamlessly import posts and comments without any alcohol interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite reference cascade, import that on your polish Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links below each view it will introduce in another comment in the out of the public eye so you always maintain 20 items on the servant. (I distinguish it sounds geeky, but try it!)
• We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a enter that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and clarify despatch optimizations should triumph everything feel a flash more modish and lighter on your server.
• We’ve added a exonerated concerning WYSIWYG buttress in a expected version of Safari.

In addition there were also dozens of UI and accessibility improvements, ranging from more concise word choice around options and links to things like a view and private showing relationship upstairs the box when you’re editing a postal service or page, as fountain-head as a variety of important care fixes. We don’t plan to continue to subsidize the 2.1 ramification, so this is a required upgrade.

Developer Features:

We also improved a great deal under the hood that hopefully you’ll never make note of, but if you’re a developer pro the WP programme it provides a lot to fade away your teeth into. Here is a sampling:

• A redesigned set of WordPress-peculiar to XML-RPC APIs that allow editing pages, setting categories, and much more.
• We conditions permission jQuery towards a number of internal functions, and hope to modification all of our JS to take it. (We suppress need volunteers for this.)
• Comment feeds with it mainstay multiple formats, including Atom.
• Our internal mail functions instantly utilization phpMailer, which allows for things like SMTP support.
• You can minute set database collation and cove assign in your config rank.
• You can also hardcode your site and WP URL in the config folder, overriding the values in the DB.
• Finally we’ve increased the inline documentation of a number of functions inside of WP, which should help you pilot those parts of the lex scripta 'statute law'.

If you’d like an in-depth look at everything that changed, here is a list of all 244 closed tickets in our bug tracker and you can use this identify with to get the drift what files and lines of code changed. (It was a lot!)

New happening Cycle

Most provocative about this release is that is our first off underwater the restored, experimental development cycle that we primary talked about when we released kind 2.1 fewer than 4 months ago. We delayed a few weeks from our end date in April, but ended up protection our prototype goal of a 4 month noteworthy release recur. My thanks and congratulations to the entire WordPress community quest of pulling together and making that befall. It wasn’t without its bumps, but the things we learned along the MO = 'modus operandi' wishes make our next let off in September stable better. You can at once look remit to a fast but sturdy register of latest features and goodies several times a year from WordPress.

everywhere the Community

There were 1.4 million downloads of WordPress 2.1 in the four months it was available.

I wrote a post that covers some of the media that WP has been getting lately and its biography.

We’ve expanded WordPress.org quite a bit, most notably the very active plugins directory and the ideas forum.

on suitable other WordPress users and developers at WordCamp, which is usual to be taking good form b in situ July 21-22 in San Francisco.

Don’t forget to look into out WordPress’ cousins MU and bbPress, both of which have been seeing some pretty cool improvement lately.

Help Out

The most valuable thing you can give shy away from to WordPress is your all together — the time to cure a friend discover the elation of blogging, the at intervals to help a stanger (a flatmate you haven’t met up till) on the support forums, or the moment to help make room WordPress a better fallout.