• Updated inline documentation throughout.
• Complete simplification and re-cajiggering of HTML structure and class and ID names. This is likely to screw up your existing child themes. Beware.
• Speed and logic optimizations all around, including minified and combined javascript (reversable with the ‘debug’ option).
• Permalinks for Rolling Archives and livesearch (finally).
• Rolling Archives now caches 5 pages to either side of its position for faster navigation.
• Configuration of amount of widget containers (thus sidebars) is now automatic, depending on whether they are active or not.
• Added ‘Below Page Header’, ‘After Posts’ and ‘Page Footer’ widget areas.
• WP media manager’s horrible embedded CSS is now removed by K2.
• Cleaned up the options page.
• Support for WordPress 3.0: Multi-sites, the menu system and custom backgrounds.
• Removed various deprecated functions.
• Removed our styles sub-system entirely. Use child-themes instead.
• Single attachments, shown with image.php, have been updated.
• Option to disable K2′s styling (style.css), for more control and much nicer child theme CSS.
• Automatically resizes the smallest of the large YouTube embeds (560px wide) to 500px width (to cancel, remove/overwrite k2_resize_embeds() in your child theme).
• Added support for using k2-loop-category-<slug>.php
• Added option to use the page name when page is selected for home.
• Removed asides functionality (use semantic class, CSS and plugins instead).
• Added styling for the visual editor in the admin.
• Added comments pagination.
• Moved ping- and trackbacks inline with comments.
• Check to see if a version of jQuery later than the one we ship with (1.4.2) has been registered and don’t overwrite it. This really ought to be native to WP.
• A plethora of bug fixes and compatibility tweaks.

Go get it and let us know if it breaks. Meanwhile we’re on the brink of locking localization strings for the translators (the .pot has been updated, and we will do our utmost to not change any strings between now and 1.1, so you should be safe).

Did I mention K2 now supports twenty different languages!?

Important: This release contains significant changes to… well, everything. Backup your database, just to be on the safe side. We haven’t seen any wonky behavior, but on the other hand we won’t be held responsible if it kills you kitten either, so…

WordPress uses ‘post’, and so of course it makes sense when designing classes for the title of a post to name it ‘post-title’ and for the content to be named ‘post-content’, right? Well until you want to add support for the hatom microformat, which has chosen ‘entry’ to denote an article (oh, there’s another one) and so uses ‘entry-title’ and ‘entry-content’.

Which one to choose? Yes, you could go with both, but that’s rather inelegant, and feels a bit like sitting between two chairs.

I chose to go with the hatom naming and trust that people can figure it out on their own, even though it pains me a bit to not conform to the ‘mother’ platforms naming conventions, I think the gain of hatom compatibility is worth it.

K2 hasn’t always been the most frequently updated theme in the official sense of us putting out releases. We’ve often poured changes into the repository and fed people the latest nightlies if they wanted to stay up-to-date. And by doing so we ‘trained’ everyone to think of the nightlies and subversion in general as place for (mostly) stable updates.

And we try to keep it that way.

But.

The new course is to instead be more rigorous with actual releases and in turn ween everyone off of using the nightlies and subversion for production purposes. This is important, because we’re already in the midst of some sweeping changes, and they will mean broken sites if you rely blindly on subversion or nightlies.

PS: I’ve set up K2 on Twitter, as that seems to be what all the youngsters are raving about these days.

There will be more on this soon, but consider this both a warning and a heads up, if you want to adapt your child theme or style for the next major release of K2. These changes, which massively simplify K2 and were previously planned for v1.2, but will instead find their way into v1.1, are meant to make K2 easier to get around.

The short-term downside is that there will be some extra work adjusting existing styles and child themes; but it’s definitely worth it (and should have been done a long time ago).

The revision number for this version is 932, and here’s the changelist:

• Translation files (.mo) are now read from /languages/ in preparation for 1.1.
• Fixed has_post_thumbnail checking to improve compatibility with WordPress 2.8.
• Removed a couple of pure database calls in favor of core WP functions.
• Fixed rolling archives navigation showing atop of Lightbox.
• Updated a couple of translation strings.
• Fixed size of edit link in ping- and trackbacklist.
• Fixed #855: Absolute instead of relative links for WordPress’ theme editor.
• Escaped API updates.
• Fixed livesearch icons showing on initial load on IE8.
• Hide certain unneeded navigation elements when rolling archives are active.
• Cleaned up livesearch JS.
• Various CSS updates.
• Made pages accept normal comment/pingback links.
• Top menu handles too many items more elegantly.
• Added support for automatic feed links.

Meanwhile we’re already up to six translation in our new i18n repo, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish and Turkish (Update: And now also Latvian and German), and I couldn’t be more thrilled. But the more the merrier, so get in touch if you’d like to do a translation for K2.

Now skip on over and download 1.0.2.

First up is a new guide on how to use and create translations for those of you thinking about getting your feet wet.

Furthermore we’ve created a new i18n repository which we’ll open for those wanting to submit and maintain translations. Those translations in turn will find their way into the 1.1 release and become a part of K2 from here on out.

Over the next few weeks we’ll try and get in touch with as many of the previous translators as we can, and start filling up the i18n repository with 1.0 translations.

Questions? Comments? You know where to reach us.

Happy new year.