This week’s meetup wasn’t too heavy, some fairly light items as the developers are preparing to release WordPress 2.9 soon. WordPress 2.8.5 was recently released as a security update, termed as a “hardening release,” so make sure you are up to date.
There were two highlight points of discussion for this week’s meetup.
WordPress Mailing List
As it stands right now, somewhere upwards of 25% of all WordPress blogs are not logged into regularly, which can cause security issues. If users are not staying up to date, it can begin to give WordPress a bad rap as being easy to hack, which is not the case at all. I’ve been using WordPress since 2003 (now 6 years) and I’ve never had any of my personal sites hacked.
So what the proposal idea is to just use a separate mailing list that people can subscribe to. No core modifications will be made to WordPress for this particular item.
Dynamic Image Resizing
WordPress Dynamic Image Resizing is something I’m very excited about as a possible feature of WordPress 3.0. I ran into a problem not too long ago where I changed my site’s theme and the content area shifted from 640px to 520px which created a problem for me. The solution I ended up using was by using CSS, but it’s not a great solution, in my opinion.
It’s not finalized yet, but there is a Trac ticket about it where the core developers are discussing the best approach. WordPress developers still need to discuss this further as to what functionality is actually desired for the whole WordPress community.
But, one thing is for sure, I really hope that we will see dynamic image resizing within WordPress with the release of WordPress 3.0. One item I’m really pushing for is easy image management with dynamic image resizing while utilizing a CDN (Content Delivery Network), as I’m starting to move more and more sites’ media images and files to a CDN.
That’s it for this week’s meetup, stay tuned for next week!
