2007 has almost come to a close and it’s always a good time to reflect on the previous 365 days. In this case, I take a look back at the progress of WordPress during 2007 by documenting each release of WordPress. For the timeline, I used a free web service called xtimeline. This timeline showcases all of the major releases of WordPress during 2007. The timeline begins on January 5th, 2007 and ends on October 26th, 2007. The space in between the months at the bottom of the timeline represent the days. You can also hover your mouse cursor over each entry to see the date. If you click on an entry, the details for that entry will show up on the sidebar on the right.
For those with Javascript disabled in their browser, here is the textual version of the timeline:
Jan 5, 2007 – WordPress 2.0.6 is released to the public. This release included an important security fix along with a few other goodies.
Jan 15, 2007 – WordPress 2.0.7 was released because of a bug in certain versions of PHP which would cause a security vulnerability in a wordpress powered blog.
Jan 22, 2007 – 2.1 was one of the major releases to take place during 2007. This release included a number of new features along with 550 bug fixes.
Feb 21, 2007 – February was a quiet time in WordPress land in terms of releases. 2.1.1 and 2.0.9 were mostly security fix releases with 2.1.1 containing 30 bug fixes.
Apr 3, 2007 – Soon after the beginning of April 2007, WordPress released version 2.1.3 and 2.0.10. At this point, WordPress was still supporting both the 2.0 and 2.1 code branches with simultaneous releases.
May 16, 2007 – WordPress 2.2 makes it’s debut in May of 2007. This release included Widget integration and over two hundred bug fixes. This was a big release at the time because WordPress Widgets were now included into the core code.
Jun 21, 2007 – WordPress 2.2.1 was another bug fix release for the 2.2 branch of code. Most of the bug fixes in this release were annoying little things that when fixed, added polish to the code.
Aug 5, 2007 – WordPress 2.2.2 And 2.0.11 were security releases for both the 2.2 and 2.0 code branches.
Aug 28, 2007 – This was an exciting day for some as the first beta for WordPress 2.3 was released. One of the big features in this version was the canonical URLS or SEO-Friendly URL Redirection.
Sep 8, 2007 – WordPress 2.2.3 was another bug-fix release. Two of the security bugs in this release were of high priority, which explains why this version of WordPress was released shortly before 2.3
Sep 25, 2007 – What a day in the world of WordPress. September 25th marks the release date of 2.3. This release saw WordPress picking up native tagging support, seo friendly url redirection, automatic plugin update notifications and more.
Oct 26, 2007 – WordPress 2.3.1 was a bug and security fix release for the 2.3 code branch. Over twenty bugs were fixed with this release.
Dec 29, 2007 – Just before we reached the end of the year, WordPress went ahead and released version 2.3.2 which contained a big security fix that dealt with users being able to gain access to draft posts. As a bonus, 2.3.2 gives users the ability to create their own DB error page.
After going through all of that in one year, what could possibly be next? Easy, WordPress 2.4 which is slated for release on January 24th, 2008. What can we look forward to in this version?
New User Features
*Admin redesign
* Widget-based dashboard
* You should be able to have any number of any widget
* Undo for comment editing
* Search for both posts and pages
Developer
* Use $wpdb->prepare everywhere
* Switch to expect unescaped data for internal functions
* XML-RPC refactor
Of course, the date and the features for this release are not guaranteed. I can however tell you that, the admin redesign that a lot of folks are looking forward to has begun. The latest SVN build shows an un-styled dashboard that is now in one giant column. Those that have seen the color scheme haven’t expressed a large amount of joy over the colors being used. However, there are already reports that users may be able to over-ride the admin CSS style with their own. It will be interesting to see if the majority of bugs that are introduced with the new administration panel will be squashed before January 24th.
WordPress has accomplished a lot during 2007. I’d like to take this time to thank the guys at Automattic for creating one hell of a piece of software. I also want to thank anyone and everyone who is involved with WordPress. Whether your a beta tester, bug squasher, theme developer, plugin developer, feature requester it doesn’t matter. Everyone involved has helped make WordPress what it is today.
Here is to a wonderful 2008!
*raises the glass*
Happy New Year to all people who worked hard to bring us this and for you guys updating this great and informative blog.
Come to think, the first version I used was 1.0.2. How time flies.
Nice Post 😀 Thanks for the info, i posted it in alexseo.com =p
Oh. My. Goodness. So much has changed since then! I can’t believe at the beginning of this year, I was running WordPress 2.0.6.
Then again, Al Gore is still running 2.0.4. 😉
WordPress is fantastic. I converted my blog from CuteNews to WordPress last month and really couldn’t be happier. The site works seamlessly (unlike CuteNews) and it has made publishing articles a lot of fun. I can’t wait for the updates
Thanks guys, really glad you enjoyed the article. One of my hopes for WordPress during 2008 is that, if Automattic is acquired or sold out, I hope the fundamentals behind WordPress stay in tact. I would really hate to see something as great as WordPress go down the tubes because of a change of ownership/structure.
Excellent Article. I think about the only that wordpress would get any better is to possibly them buy Drupal and marry the two together, that would be kick butt.
However, as it stands, I’m am quite pleased with WordPress.
If I only only get the cache plug-ins to work with my server. For some Oddball reason, (said in Spanish accent) It’a No’a Like’a my server… *grumble* I think it’s got to do with a change in the PHP version, I could be wrong though…
-Chuck
Wow. COngratulations to WordPress for having a successful project in the year 2007. We, bloggers, are looking more upgrades for this coming 2008.
Great work..
I am looking forward to the improved object cache which should speed things up and also improved security. cheers the WordPress team for the hard work
I bet if we’re good, all of our WordPress wishes will come true.
Merry Christmas to all! And to all a good night! 🙂
Hehe, having starte with WordPress in mid June (my then host provided v1.5!?!?!) I didn’t realize there were so many upgrades. But then, yeah, it seems every time I upgraded, the very next day a security patch or new version came out. I learned how to backup and upgrade in a hurry this year.
I love WordPress. Hope 2008 brings many good things to the developers.
The only thing I’m not real excited about, is the widgetized dashboard.
I don’t use widgets, nor do I plan to at any time in the future, thus I don’t care about a widgetized dashboard. If anything, I don’t use the dashboard for anything to begin with, and some plugins even modify it sightly, which I have never cared for either. I don’t use widgets, purposely, because I put too much customization into the sidebar, which widgets do not support.
otherwise, I have been extremely happy with the progress of WordPress in 2007, and I can only hope they do as well in 2008 also. Merry Christmas everyone!
For 2008, hopefully someone will create a decient gravatar.com plugin, or integrate it into wordpress one of the two. gravatar.com on every blog I visit, shows my email as the default gravatar “G”, yet I troubleshoot my own gravatar, and it shows up fine on the gravatar.com site, just not on anyone elses blogs.
I mean, I goto
http://site.gravatar.com/support/check
type in my email address, and my gravatar shows up fine, so I goto
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.....ecb6bd225c
like the site says, and it shows up fine there too, but it won’t show up on here, or any other blog I’ve been to lately. its frustrating.
I don’t know what the gravatar problem is Bubazoo, but after checking the links and stuff, it definitely looks like there is something wrong with the way Gravatar is serving up your specific avatar. Have you gotten in contact with gravatar support?
every time updating, updating updating. If you have thousands of blog its a realy hard word 😉
I’ve gone ahead and edited the timeline along with the article to include the release of 2.3.2