Credit Report Blog

If you follow WordPress development closely you’ve probably noticed a few new faces around lately, or to be more accurate a few old faces who are taking on bigger roles in the community. I would like to take this opportunity to announce and publicly congratulate Mark Jaquith and Peter Westwood who have both become lead developers, the highest development honor on WordPress.org.

Mark Jaquith has been using and contributing to WordPress since 2004. Mark especially enjoys watching people use WordPress to express themselves in areas of the world where free expression is suppressed. But, being a voracious consumer of information, he probably reads your cat blog too.

Peter works as an Embedded Software Engineer developing a web-enabled BMS controller. Using WordPress since version 1.0.1, Peter spends his spare time triaging bugs on Trac and investigating new open source tools. When not at the computer Peter can often be found photographing flowers, animals and cars and listening to a wide variety of music.

In just a few short days WordPress 2.3 will be coming out with tons of new features that (hopefully) will make you want to upgrade right away. Well while you have a bit of time over this lovely weekend, here are some things you can do to help yourself prepare for the big upgrade on Monday:

• Back up your blog. It never goes out of style, and we have a nifty Codex page with a few different methods.
• Check for the latest versions of your plugins. Here’s a list of known compatible and incompatible plugins with 2.3, Google Sitemaps seems to be one causing a lot of issues. (Forum thread.) Upgrading might get you cool new features anyway. Don’t forget about our plugin directory.
• Enjoy the last time you have to check for plugin updates manually, as 2.3 will do it magically behind the scenes.
• Read up on how to modify your theme to add tag support.
• Consider switching your install to use Subversion to make updating ultra-easy.
• Make a list of your friends who are less computer literate so you can help them upgrade. (Maybe throw an upgrade party?)

If you have any other ideas put them on your blog and pingback this post.