Looking for a utility that will repair errors on your Windows system, (hopefully) improve performance and also increase your privacy? The free registry cleaners and repair tools on this new page not only fixes problems in your windows registry, some of them can also remove the records of files/folders that you recently accessed (useful for people who share their computers with nosy friends).
The WordPress team had initially committed to maintaining the WordPress 2.0.x legacy branch until 2010. Unfortunately, we bit off more than we could chew—the 2.0.x branch is now retired and deprecated, a few months shy of 2010.
Many of the security improvements to the new versions of WordPress in the last couple of years were complete reworks of how various systems were handled. Porting those changes to the 2.0.x branch would have been a monumental task and could have introduced instability or new bugs. We had to make hard decisions between stability and merging in the latest security enhancements. Additionally, far fewer people stayed on the 2.0.x branch than we anticipated. I take that as a testament to the new features in WordPress and perhaps even more the features offered by plugins, many of which don’t support older versions of WordPress!
I’m disappointed that we weren’t able to keep the branch maintained until 2010, but since one of the big reasons for that failure was the massive scope of our security improvements for the newer versions of WordPress, 2.0.x doesn’t die in vain!
A new embeddable WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) HTML editor has been added to the Free Online Web-Based WYSIWYG HTML Editor JavaScripts page. This open source JavaScript editor can be embedded into your web pages to provide your users with the ability to create/edit HTML code directly from the browser.
Important: this software is for people who already have websites and know what "JavaScript" means. If you are just starting out, and are looking for a web editor to create your own website, please see the Free HTML Editors and WYSIWYG Web Editors page instead.
A new open source backup program, Areca Backup, has been added to the Free Hard Disk Backup and Restore, Hard Disk Image and Cloning Utilities page. If you need a program that you can use to selectively back up files and folders, perform incremental, differential and full backups, encrypt and compress your backups, check this program out.
Note: this is not a full hard disk image program. If you are looking for something to back up your entire hard disk so that you can fully restore your system in a disaster, check out some of the other programs listed on the same page. There are now 28 free backup/image software listed, so you should hopefully be able to find something that suits your needs.
We’ve recently made some changes to help improve the communication between plugin authors and plugin users about the changes that are made between versions.
We feel that all software should have a changelog that details, at a high level, what changes have been made in each version so that the user can make an informed decision about when to upgrade and how much testing they should do with their site.
In order to make this an easy and open communication channel we have added support for a Changelog section in the plugins readme.txt file. This changelog information is then displayed as a separate tab in the plugin directory and also in the back end of your WordPress blog when you view the details on a new version of a plugin.
The new section is formatted as follows:
== Changelog == = 1.0 = * A change since the previous version. * Another change. = 0.5 = * List versions from most recent at top to oldest at bottom.
We would also like to recommend that you also provide meaningful log messages when you commit changes to the subversion repository for your plugin so that people who want to dig further into your changes can see why things are changing (At the moment is seems a large number of plugin authors leave this field blank which isn’t very helpful).
WordPress 2.8.2 fixes an XSS vulnerability. Comment author URLs were not fully sanitized when displayed in the admin. This could be exploited to redirect you away from the admin to another site. Download 2.8.2 or automatically upgrade from the Tools->Upgrade page of your blog’s admin.
A new word processor for Mac OS X, Bean, has been added to the Free Word Processors and Office Suites page. If you want a Cocoa wordprocessor that isn't bloated with features you don't really use, check this out. Or take a look at the other free wordprocessors on that page: there are numerous, for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.
A new Modula-2 compiler has been added to the Free Modula-2 Compilers page. The Objective Modula-2 compiler aims to be a Modula-2 compiler with object oriented extensions. It is targeted at Cocoa (Mac OS X) and GNUstep development.
Note that the compiler is still not yet complete, but the source is available. If you need a fully functional Modula-2 compiler, please see the other entries on the page. There are now 11 Modula-2 compilers on the page, so if you want to write programs in Modula-2, there are quite a few free development tools to choose from.
A new free PDF reader has been added to the Free PDF Readers / Viewers page. This reader, Cool PDF Reader, claims to be the "world's smallest PDF viewer/reader" at only 650 KB. It can be installed using an installer, or be copied to a USB drive for portable use on any computer. Why suffer the huge size and sluggish performance of the Adobe Reader when you can get small and fast alternatives? Check it out.
WordPress 2.8.1 fixes many bugs and tightens security for plugin administration pages. Core Security Technologies notified us that admin pages added by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users, resulting in information being leaked. Not all plugins are vulnerable to this problem, but we advise upgrading to 2.8.1 to be safe.
What else is new since 2.8? Read through the highlights below, or view all changes since 2.8