With the release of RC1, we’re in the final leg of development before the release of 2.7. 280 commits since beta 3 have polished the new admin UI (including new menu icons created by the winners of our icon design contest) and fixed all known blocker bugs.
We think RC1 is ready for everyone to try out. Please download RC1 and help us make the final release the best it can be. As always, back up your blog before upgrading.
WordPress 2.6.5 is immediately available and fixes one security problem and three bugs. We recommend everyone upgrade to this release.
The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.
2.6.5 contains three other small fixes in addition to the XSS fix. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision. The second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types. The third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests. For a list of changed files, consult the full changeset between 2.6.3 and 2.6.5.
Note that we are skipping version 2.6.4 and jumping from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds. There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.
With WordPress 2.7’s release just around the corner, there has definitely been some excitement building. However, with some of the major changes being introduced in WordPress 2.7, I’ve noticed a large number of people are not ready to make the upgrade.
If you’d instead prefer to stick with the WordPress 2.6.x branch or below, Quick Online Tips recently featured a number of WordPress plugins that anyone can use to get much of the functionality introduced in WordPress 2.7.
WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 has been released for your testing pleasure. Here are some of the changes since Beta 2 (over 160 changes in total):
One of the things that has always made SEO so tricky is that Google doesn’t really comment much about search engine optimization techniques and they are always changing their algorithm, leaving testing as the only way to figure out what SEO techniques work.
Well, in case any of our readers missed it, Google has released an official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF). It doesn’t release any of Google’s algorithm secrets, but it does cover Google’s best practices for title tags, meta tags, URL structure, navigation, content, anchor text, headers, images and of course, Robots.txt, making this a good way to review the basics and make sure you have that stuff down correctly.