Category: Alpha

The fifth Alpha release of the 1.0.0 line is here. In addition to continued development of calmPress itself, it incorporates changes from the WordPress 5.0.2 release which are not related to Gutenberg .

Simplification of the user profile
All fields that do not make much sense were removed, and there is more flexibility in setting a display name.

Username is not being used anymore anywhere in the UI.
In all of the places where a username was expected as an input, or it was displayed, it is replaced by the user’s email address.

In the UI related to user registration, the user does not need to select a username, just specify a unique email address.

For backward compatibility, all places which used to accept either username or user’s email address as input (for example, login form) will still accept a username even if the UI indicates that an email address is expected.

From a developers perspective, there was no change in the user APIs, and the main change is that the username is not mandatory anymore. When creating a new user, it will be automatically generated from the email address.

Users will still have a username in the DB, it is just not going to be used anywhere in the core UI.

A category is not mandatory for posts
You do not have to have a hierarchical categorization of content if you do not want it.

Password protection of posts was removed
The main reason for removal is that it has bad UX for the author, reader, and developers. We are going to figure out better ways to manage restricted content, but this is so bad there is no point in keeping it around until we will have a better approach to the problem.

The relevant API to detect if a post is password protected is still there, it is just going to return a value indicating a password is not needed.

UI for post formats was removed
The general impression is that themes do not provide any significant distinction between the various formats and that custom post types are probably a better and more robust way to achieve the goals that post formats feature were trying to achieve.

From a developers perspective, there is no change. Attempts to change the post format via the API, are just going to be ignored.

Calendar and archive widgets were removed
It seems like navigating content based on its publishing date is an extreme edge case.

Get it now!  Just be aware that PHP 7.0 is a minimum requirement to run it.

The second Alpha release of the 1.0.0 line is here. In addition to incorporating the PHP 7.3 compatibility changes from the 0.9.9 release, the major change in this release is removal of all shims related to emojis.

From now on it is assumed that, for better or worse, proper support for displaying emojis is up to the browsers and it does not require software based crutches (which many times produce a sub-optimal result). Just like with using text which is in a different language then the main language used on the site, it is up to the author to decide whether the target audience is likely to use software  that will properly display the emojis being used.

Our impression is that for the most used emojis there is a very broad support, and you are not likely to run into display problems unless you use some fringe or very new emoji in the content.

Get it now!  Just be aware that PHP 7.0 is a minimum requirement to run it.

The first release of the 1.0 line is here. Among many somewhat esoteric improvements, the  1.0.0-alpha1 release handles two major pain points that were bothering all WordPress users:

• Trackback and Pingback spam. All of the code related to receiving and sending them was removed.
• User name discovery through /author=id type of URLs. This is an intentional side affect of the decision to not support “plain” URLs anymore, as they tend to display in public, private information that is just better kept secret even when there is no immediate security issue related to it.

Get it now! Just be aware that PHP 7.0 is a minimum requirement to run it.