On behalf of the WordPress.org community of commiters, contributers, and volunteers, I’m very proud to announce the immediate availability of WordPress 2.1 “Ella”, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. Here’s a sampling of what’s in the new version:

• Autosavemakes sure you never lose a post again.
• Our new tabbed editorallows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and exportmakes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy optionallows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzasfrom MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now loads instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
• The upload managerlets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• A new version of the Akismet pluginis bundled.

…and much, much more. There are little easter eggs hidden everywhere, so the best way to find everything new is to just try it out.

Developer Features

Developers will especially love this release, as it has much cleaner code than 2.0 and includes hundreds of enhancements that will enable a new generation of richer plugins. Here’s a taste of some of the things included:

• Psuedo-cron functionality let’s you schedule events much like cron.
• Users admin can now comfortably handle hundreds of thousands of users.
• The new WP_Error class cleans up how we do error reporting and handling.
• The javascript loader makes it easier for plugins to include rich functionality.
• Tons of new hooks and APIs.
• We’ve started to fill out our code inline documentation.
• Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins.
• Custom header, color picker, and image cropping framework.

2.1 also includes over 550 bug fixes.

The Future

What’s really exciting for me is what’s coming in the future. First of all, the 2.0 series was an unparalleled success, with over 1.8 million downloads, and thanks to the work of Mark Jaquith we’re committing to maintaining stable security and bug fixes on the 2.0 branch until 2010.

More exciting for most of our users, though, is our new development cycle. Based on everything we’ve learned in the past 3 years of doing WordPress, we’ve decided to shift to a more frequent release schedule like Ubuntu, with major releases coming several times a year. So, for the first time in WordPress’ history, I have an answer to when the next version is coming out: April 23rd.

Even better, the development will be driven primarily by the features you guys are voting for on the ideas board. (But wait, there’s more: the ideas board now has a new Hot-or-Not-like interface for rating a bunch of ideas at once, so go get your vote on and have a say in WordPress 2.2.)

This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

A simple command-line tool to create the folders and helper files for a new JavaScript project/library. As a bonus, you can quickly create a website to promote your project.

When you start a new JavaScript library, how do you layout the source files, the tests, the distribution files? Do you have support scripts to generate distributions from source files? Run your JavaScript unit tests? Generators to create new unit test HTMLfiles?

What is XSTM?

XSTMis made of three projects. The Java implementation is called JSTMand is the base from which the other versions are derived. An adapted version made with Luciano, the author of GWM , is available for GWT . It allowsthis library to be used in a browser. NSTM is a .NET port based on IKVM.

All implementations are compatible with each other so object replication can take place e.g. between a Java server and a .NET Smart Client.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Mapsand Gmaileasy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Javaprogramming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Using Caja, web apps can safely allow scripts in third party content.
The computer industry has only one significant success enabling documents to carry active content safely: scripts in web pages. Normal users regularly browse untrusted sites with Javascript turned on. Modulo browser bugs and phishing, they mostly remain safe. But even though web apps build on this success, they fail to provide its power. Web apps generally remove scripts from third party content, reducing content to passive data. Examples include webmail, groups, blogs, chat, docs and spreadsheets, wikis, and more.
Were scripts in an object-capability language, web apps could provide active content safely, simply, and flexibly. Surprisingly, this is possible within existing web standards. Caja represents our discovery that a subset of Javascript is an object-capability language