Brand new features in WordPress 2.5 - Part II

Part I, did all the magic on users eyes, but Part II has more features for the developer’s. Lets get started with the second part of the “Brand new features in WordPress 2.5“. This part gives you an incite on the new features added for the developer’s community, WP 2.5 has many important features on the developer side too. Lets get into everyone and find whats new in the store!.

These stuff are a bit geeky, there are plenty new features waiting around which will take WP 2.5 to the next level, all these developer features are based on Security, Optimization, Documentation and Display.

Secure cookies — Old Wordpress used cookies with plain data, which were pretty unsafe, but we now have a new cookie technology, where cookies are now encrypted based on new protocol which can be found here . The total cookie is now encrypted with a secret key. which is something like user name|expiration time|HMAC( user name|expiration time, k) where k = HMAC(user name|expiration time, sk) and where sk is a secret key, which you can define in your config.

Salted passwords — This feature sounds funny but they have created a new mark on the field of password management, with this new feature passwords are now totally secure from brute forcing, they have done this by stretching and salting the password, stretching is where the password is concatenated with a random string, and salting is where random words are added to the password this make passwords secure to the max. WP 2.5 uses MD5 hashing for hashing its passwords.

Easy taxonomy and URL creation — All info on users are created based on their taxonomy, in other words the users identity is now converted into URL’s where the user data are stored.

Inline documentation — There is a vast increase in the features list, but Wordpress has made effective documentation that would help all users and developers to understand and use all the features listed on it.

Database optimization — The table schema is the same as before, this enables users to use those same plugins from before works good with the 2.5 too. They have added a few new indicies and made a few default fields more flexible based on some bottlenecks which was present with the older version.

DB prepare() — All SQL details of WP 2.5, has been prepared first, Which means the same functions are available to your plugins. This should prevent elementary SQL escaping issues.

Media buttons — the add media buttons above the post are both expandable, so you can now add any kind of buttons to that space, you can add a “IMDB search” button or a “goggle map button”, They can be overridden, so you can add your own tab on it, if you are good on making one, then you can replace that with the default.

Shortcode API — There is a all new gallery function embedded with WP 2.5, the new gallery functionality is powered by the new shortcode API. Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings, which turn into a meaning full function on the runtime, they are similar to tags that on forums. They give users a short, easy to type and copy/paste string which can be used and remembered by users making their job easy and also reducing the complexity.

These are the features which has been added with WP 2.5 for the developers, these new features make the board more secure and more stable. All these features were developed for a long time and has been embedded into WP without damaging the old framework, I take this moment to thank all those coders and developers who worked behind the screens to provide us with another amazing tool with ample features. With this conclusion both parts of “Brand new features in WordPress 2.5″ is complete, Hope this article helped you in understanding WP 2.5 and its features. We are open to comments, so please them posted.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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2 Responses to “Brand new features in WordPress 2.5 - Part II”

  1. Forum Development Blog
    April 16th, 2008 at 5:48 am

    Yes, Worddpress 2.5 has improved significantly and i love the new features. Nice entry here.

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