WordPress 1.5.1 is out
The WordPress team have released version 1.5.1 of the PHP-based blogging application which is used to run this weblog. They have published a brief list of the major changes here; there are a few new features and a lot of bug fixes. They also have instructions as to how to upgrade.
I really like WordPress for reasons I’ve explained many times here. It publishes fast – none of MT’s rebuilding and associated errors, its spam-proofing is much better, at least for now, and it’s elegant and mature (see the Textpattern websites if you want to know what I’m comparing it with). Still, I find that they don’t communicate with their user base to the extent I think they should. The first I knew of 1.5.1’s impending release was when I reported a code-validity bug yesterday, and I noticed a reference to a version 1.5.1 when it came to letting them know which version of WordPress I was talking about. I later checked their bug-tracker to find that the bug had been fixed for version 1.5.1. I only knew 1.5.1 was out when I saw the flurry of announcements on my Dashboard.
Obviously, if you subscribe to one of their mailing lists, you’ll get this information. Or perhaps the support pages would carry it, if you have recently needed the support enough to check them. But surely a development blog should carry some of that information as well? The WP Development blog isn’t really a development blog; it’s a general WP interest blog. Of the five most recent posts on the blog now, one is about using betas and pre-release versions, one is a product release announcement for 1.5.1, and the other three have nothing to do with development at all.
Still, it’s great to see the application coming on. I’d really like it if they were to incorporate my “Remember details” hack in a future edition. I’d warmly recommend it to anyone starting a new blog. I’ve got a bit of advice as well. Don’t even look at a hosting plan which offers less than 3Gb of data transfer per month. The main reason why I stay with my current host, Fasthosts, is that they have no specific upper limit on data transfer. Remember that my blog isn’t all that well-read – you only have to see the relative lack of comments to see that. Nonetheless, my data transfer for yesterday was 57.08 megabytes. In a 31-day month like May, that would add up to 1769.48 Mb, that is, 1.73 gigabytes. There are an awful lot of hosting plans which only offer 1Gb per month, which would result in my blog being off-line for a sizeable part of each month. Even if not many people visit your blog, you will still get visits from robots, like the Googlebot and others used to build search engines (a full 48.7% of my hits yesterday were from “robots” or agents of unknown types; these include search engine bots and RSS programs). If you host more than one blog or someone else’s blog, a high data-transfer is even more vital.
