The WordPress development team has a new schedule for releases- one major version every 3 months is the goal. Today, WordPress 2.3 is supposed to be realeased and there is a very good post at Technosailor about the 10 things you need to know.

I’m most excited about Plugin version notifications. If there has been one bane to our developers existence, it’s been broken WP updates- because a plugin isn’t updated- causing us to go through the trial and error check. Now WP will let us know when plugins are updated- solving this very real problem. The Tagging function is cool- but this is useful.

10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.3
Update Notifications

Update notifications have been a long requested feature of WordPress and thankfully in this release, it’s been delivered – not once, but twice. Now WordPress can alert you when a new version of WordPress is available as well as new plugin versions.

There are 9 other cool things he talks about- and we’ll have some info on 2.3 as well- once the final release is out. We’ve updated all of our WP installs on our server to use Fantastico for updates- so as soon as it hit’s fantastico’s server- we’ll be able to update with one click.

In case all of a sudden you start seeing strange characters instead of an apostrophe-there is a good chance it can easily be fixed by a simple tweak to your wp-config file.

In the move for global blog domination, WordPress began acknowledging character encoding for different languages- this excellent article will give you the answers you need to your broken WordPress install:

WordPress Charset Encoding Problem After Upgrading to Version 2.2 » My Digital Life
WordPress blogs that upgraded to WordPress version 2.2 may encounter strange character set (charset) encoding problem where several characters especially apostrophes (’), quotation marks (”), and hyphens or dashes (—) are displayed as strange characters such as ’ or simply as question marks (?) when the posts are output to web pages. As you have probably suspected, the issue is caused by character encoding method used by WordPress 2.2 which supports setting of database collation and character set in WordPress config file.

We’ve been dealing with it sporadically on our server- and know how to fix it chop-chop. Just give us a call.

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