There's a recurring debate about WordPress and whether they should keep code compatible with PHP 5.2 or drop it and bump the requirements to a newer PHP version. Hey, I have an opinion on this. What's wrong with PHP 5.2? Nothing much, except PHP 5.2 was released in November 2006, and was maintained and developed […][...] → Read more

… where "making an UI" means coding the plugin option page, making it understandable, carefully pick some wording, don't overwhelm with unneeded explanations but make sure everything is crystal clear, throw a bit of jQuery to make the page more functional. … and sometimes I'm a bit fed up with this pattern. Note that it's […][...] → Read more

Lately, every time I manually flagged a comment as spam, I started to have the impression that they all were posted on the same post, namely an old announcement for my plugin "Absolute Comments". An SQL query later, my impression was confirmed: this blog post *is* a spam magnet: I suspect that some particular keywords […][...] → Read more

As a sequel to my previous post about the number of functions across WordPress history, let's talk now about files and sizes. Through the 54 releases to date, WordPress has grown from an immature toddler to a big healthy kid. The following graph shows the evolution of the zip archive size and the total uncompressed […][...] → Read more

A few fun and useless facts I collected while mining through 54 WordPress releases, from 0.7.1 to 3.0.1: The latest version of WordPress, 3.0.1 as of publishing, has 3240 PHP functions defined. The first version (0.7.1) had 309 Across all WordPress versions, 3920 PHP functions have been defined and used On average, each ".X" release […][...] → Read more

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My most popular stuff on del.icio.us just got past 1000 bookmarks, and my feed reader count is now just above 500. I love you all![...] → Read more

Something seems to be broken between Feedburner and Netvibes. Yesterday, Planet WordPress was showing off a cool 1050 feed readers, and today the counter has dropped down to 267. After logging in Feedburner's control panel to check some stats, I found out that: Netvibes users are not counted any longer Netvibes user count used to […][...] → Read more

Some dude is going to deactivate his spam protection (Akismet) for one day, on December 15th, and the idea is actually starting to spread. What a pointless idea… I mean, everyone knows how many spam they're getting each day: Akismet as a WordPress plugin comes with a spam counter. I know I get between 100 […][...] → Read more

Anyone can notify about bugs in WordPress using Trac, where also anyone can submit patches to fix them. When someone actually submits a patch which is later on approved by head developers and included in WordPress' core, the changelog contains a tiny credit to them: "props Joti" for example (props meaning something like thanks, yeepee, […][...] → Read more