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.

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).

Bugs

I’ve gone through all the new issues in the issues database over the last few weeks and updated most of the ones that were floating around unassigned. Many of the open bugs have already been fixed, but there is still a substantial list of issues in need of more information from the reporters.

Beyond that, if you know of any issues, large or small, that aren’t already in the issues list, please take a minute to let us know so we can figure out what to do with it in relation to 1.0. In an effort to get the 1.0 happening sooner rather than later, I may be somewhat brutal in assigning new issues to the 1.1 milestone, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be dealt with. However, as you may have noticed, K2 development has a tendency to happen in short concentrated sprints. This is one, and if you want something noticed and fixed, now is a good time.

Check out the changelog for recent changes, grab the latest nightly and take it for a spin.

Localization

For our brave and tireless translators. I love you. But more than that, I hope you can find the time to update your localizations for 1.0. In return, my promise is that for 1.1 one of the main pushes will be to get the localizations into the trunk and support them with an easy language selector from the options page (also known as issue #793).

As usual, you can use the support group for communications and the localization home to upload your .pot files.

Logo

Yep, in black and white.

• Option A: Start using Widgets.

or

• Option B: Install the K2 Sidebar Manager plugin. Extract the zip into your wp-content/plugins/ folder and activate it via the Plugins admin. This is the same K2 Sidebar Manager that was included with K2 1.0-RC7, bugs and all. However, this plugin will also work with other widgets-ready themes. There is no support for this plugin.

There is a bug in K2 1.0-RC7 which causes K2′s layout to break with WordPress 2.7.1. If you are using or planning to update to WordPress 2.7.1 (which you should if you’re using WordPress 2.7), you have two options:

Option A: Download the fixed info.php and replace the existing: k2/app/includes/info.php.

OR

Option B: Upgrade to the latest K2 nightly.

One more thing, there will be a 1.0-RC8 release of K2 and this release will not contain the K2 Sidebar Manager. Work is being done on a K2 Sidebar Manager to Widgets importer.

2009-02-18 Update: Added clarification.

With regards to K2′s Sidebar Modules versus WordPress’ widget system, we’ve chosen to discontinue the SBM. Granted, the widget system isn’t nearly as cool as the SBM’s, but upkeep and maintenance is expensive for the two of us left, so…

Meanwhile, Steve is hard at work at putting together a new release, which is right around the corner.