Key changes since early January, on the top of my head:

• The Semiologic theme automatically resets its panels when needed (e.g. after weird series of events when previewing and not enabling the theme).
• It also fixes WP 2.9 thumbnail cropping.
• Cache flush fixes in Smart Links and Widgets.
• Sem Cache fixes for Apache 1.3 servers.
• Version Checker now works around quite a few transport problems in WP.
• It also drops theme/plugin update nags when a manual upgrade occurs.

A whole bunch of other minor tweaks also went in.

If you're interested in testing this all on your Semiologic Pro installation, browse Settings / Semiologic API Key to enable bleeding edge packages. And then Tools / Semiologic to upgrade the theme and the plugins. (Upgrade Version Checker first, so as to use the transport fixes where needed.)

In other news:

• I'm still working on my backend. It's not moving forward as fast as I'd like it to. The parts that are nearing completion are very sexy, however.
• WP 2.9.2 got released. Though I'm sure everyone has upgraded already. (It's not a major security issue, so no need to rush on it if you haven't yet.)
• WP 3.0 is making progress. The update is going to be quite massive, from a code-base standpoint. I'll post more details in a few weeks.

In order to spare Semiologic Pro users the hassle of needing to upgrade their sites several times this week, I had been stalling a theme update and a rather large number of plugin updates until WP 2.9.1, i.e. today. As noted in a previous post, these updates are nearly all related to the new and improved Semiologic Cache 2.0.

I've released the latter too while I was at it. If you had been testing it since it was in beta, be sure to upgrade it before you upgrade WordPress. (I fixed a last minute annoyance earlier today, which made the memcache-based object cache prevent the WP database upgrade from working.)

Unless an urgent issue creeps up, our next stop will be the new back-end. WP 2.9 and Semiologic Cache 2.0 have been keeping me busy in the past weeks, not to mention taking a few much needed days off and rehashing UI ideas all over the place. But, it's making progress here and there. More on this later in the month.

A happy new year to all!

On the bright side, WP 2.9 might be the shortest lived major WordPress release yet. WP 2.9.1 RC1 is officially in the wild, a mere 10 days after WP 2.9. At the time of writing, 23 bugs were fixed; over half of them were major.

When it gets released, I'll feel quite comfortable upgrading this site. So should you.

In other news, a large batch of plugin updates are on the way. They'll be released alongside WP 2.9, so you can upgrade everything at once. As previously noted, nearly all of these updates are optimizations that are related to the coming Semiologic Cache 2.0.

Regarding the new cache plugin, special thanks go to Mark (Golf Guide). He has been doing his very best to break the plugin in the past weeks. I'll be releasing RC1 in the next few days. I'll open a forum thread when I do.

To help out with testing at that stage, toggle Bleeding Edge packages under Settings / Semiologic API Key. Be sure to choose a site with moderate importance, rather than a mere test site; the site needs some traffic for the tests to make any sense, but not so much that you cannot afford it to be quirky until we look into it (which can be minutes or hours).

As we face an uncertain and worrying New Year, we can at least console ourselves with the fact that we are not living 1,600 years ago, and about to begin the year 410. In this year Rome was sacked, and the empire gave up trying to defend Britain. While this marks the glorious beginnings of "English history", as Anglo-Saxon barbarians began their inexorable conquest of lowland Britain, it was also the start of a recession that puts all recent crises in the shade. Read More…

• One major bug was simply dismissed;
• A related critical bug was only partially fixed;
• A last critical bug (and its child bug) crept in at the last moment.

As a result of this:

• RSS widgets are completely broken on servers that are missing both of iconv and multi-byte string functions;
• The curl transport is broken on some servers with an outdated library. This breaks the WP cron, and with it future posting, pings, etc.

Not all sites are affected, of course. Most aren't, in fact. But for those few who are, the situation is frustrating.

Fixing your site

If you have upgraded your sites to WP 2.9 and are experiencing any of these issues, the fix should be a matter of uploading these three patched files to your site(s):

They go in your wp-includes folder; simply overwrite them as needed.

Please note that the fix to the SimplePie/RSS widget problem merely prevents SimplePie from failing when it's trying to convert UTF-8 into UTF-8. The correct fix would be that your host installs multi-byte string functions or iconv on your server.

Big hat tip to miqrogroove, who took the time to formally diagnose the curl problem, and scribu, who identified where the fatal errors in RSS widgets came from.

Customer reminder

As discussed in a previous post, Semiologic Pro users are advised to wait for WP 2.9.1.

Update: all three bugs are fixed in WP 2.9.1, so we'll be good to go with that release.

I had yet to install it or try it on my own site… I did today. It randomly grades this site C or D; Microsoft got an ugly D; Yahoo! Finance got a C; Yahoo itself fetched a B. The only site I've found that got an A was Google's.

I was quite surprised. Then again, taking a closer look at what it's complaining about:

• Use a CDN: on a site powered by WordPress? Yeah, right. And place assets on a separate domain name to avoid cookie overhead, I would assume? For a site like CNN, that makes sense. But for my own minuscule site, that seems so overkill…
• Add expires headers long in the future: valid point, unless I decide to change the images. I'll cope with the 304 requests for now, but I'll probably revisit the idea.
• Configure Etags: amusingly, all of the files it reports as having none actually have one, and they're returning a 304 Not Modified header. I'm assuming this is a bug in YSlow, whereby it doesn't check whether the file is in the cache.
• Add gzip compression: the same bug, in all likelihood, since the files are actually gzipped when they're sent to the browser.
• Reduce the number of DOM elements: while correct in theory, that possibly is the silliest thing I've read this year… How is a site supposed to be customizable without some amount of DOM?
• Place background images in sprites: as if… that works in some cases, but definitely not all of them. In particular when you need to center-align an icon with text whose size can vary.

YSlow was garbage when it was released. It still is; and it's full of bugs.

The most horrible thing, though, is that this thing is going to become some kind of a benchmark for worried users who don't know any better in the year to come, courtesy of Google's new indexing algorithm…

/rant

The latter disables core upgrade nags for non-bug fix WP releases. Experience has shown, in past years, that major WP releases need about an extra month of testing in the wild to be really stable. You can still upgrade, when WP 2.9 gets released, under Tools / Upgrade. But WP won't nag you into doing so.