Note to devs: trunk is broken and it’s going to be for some days. Use tags/3.0 if you want something stable

Changes in XML-RPC for 3.4. I think that’s all, or at least everything that could be relevant for the mobile apps

At r20403:

• Changelog
• Diff

New methods:

• ‘wp.newPost’
• ‘wp.editPost’
• ‘wp.deletePost’
• ‘wp.getPost’
• ‘wp.getPosts’
• ‘wp.newTerm’
• ‘wp.editTerm’
• ‘wp.deleteTerm’
• ‘wp.getTerm’
• ‘wp.getTerms’
• ‘wp.getTaxonomy’
• ‘wp.getTaxonomies’
• ‘wp.getPostType’
• ‘wp.getPostTypes’

Additions to wp.getOptions:

• image_default_link_type
• image_default_size
• image_default_align
• template
• stylesheet
• featured_image
• default_comment_status
• default_ping_status

Bugfixes:

• New date functions to avoid invalid dates
• metaWeblog.newPost verifies that wp_author_id is valid
• metaWeblog.newPost supports wp_featured_image
• metaWeblog.editPost permission checks refactored
• metaWeblog.editPost supports wp_page_template for pages
• metaWeblog.editPost supports wp_featured_image
• metaWeblog.getPost (and getRecentPosts) returns last modified dates and featured images
• metaWeblog.newMediaObject also returns attachment id

I created the Next Release report on trac, priorities are:

• Blocker: major features for the release
• Critical: anything that worked before adding new features and it’s broken now
• Major: generic bugs
• Minor, trivial: enhancements that would be nice to include in the release if there’s time

Not everything is in the right priority yet, but I think it’s a good way to sort priorities

Early reports show a higher than usual number of crashes on WPiOS 2.9.4.

It looks like there are 2 new bugs. At least one of them looks like an easy fix

I’ll try to get them fixed early next week and submit a 2.9.5 with just the bugfixes

In [2382]: Enabled GCC_WARN_ABOUT_DEPRECATED_FUNCTIONS so we get a bunch new warnings if we’re using deprecated methods. Autocompletion usually helps to avoid it when writing new code, but we should review the old code. 19 warnings only

I plan to write some coding guidelines for iOS extending what’s here (not much, I know), but one thing I need to warn right now, just in case:

If you add any external libraries, don’t modify them.

That said, if you need to change them to fit our app:

• Make it generic enough to be accepted by the original developer, if it fixes a general problem
• Try creating a subclass, or find other workaround, if it’s too specific to our app
• If you absolutely must modify the library, at least commit a clean copy of it to svn, then apply your changes and commit. This way we can have a diff of what we’ve modified and update the library easily in the future

This came from trying to update the XMLRPC library. Our version was really old, the first version committed to our svn already had modifications, in all this time they moved from svn to git losing the history. There was no sane way to figure out what our changes were compared to the original version to port them over the latest version, so I had to take a guess (only picked the changes after it was added to svn)

Feature request from twitter: better support for finding/editing old posts:

@WordPressiOS I'm requesting a feature: The ability to search or better options to go through history of blog posts. I got 1000+ posts.—
  (@XVerse10) December 16, 2011

@WordPressiOS I got 1000+ post it takes me forever to get to a post to edit from earlier this year.—
  (@XVerse10) December 16, 2011

@WordPressiOS When you do get to it. It doesn't save your position meaning to get back to it I have to start scrolling all over again.—
  (@XVerse10) December 16, 2011

First we’d need support on the XML-RPC api. In theory, metaWeblog.getRecentPosts supports everything that WP_Query supports, but I can’t find search on the documentation.

But even then, how do we decide what to keep? Most of the users will only care about the latest posts if anything, and keeping 1K posts in the app would add disk space, and possibly slow down the app.

I’ve seen some crash reports on iOS5 with the following error:

‘NSInvalidArgumentException’, reason: ‘Cannot set metadata in read-only store.’

Looking at this thread and the dev forums, it seems like an Apple bug, but one user said:

My beta testers reported that syncing with iTunes seems to clear this error up- so my guess is that iTunes sync is fixing a permissions problem.

Let’s hope they’ll fix that in a next release, since it’s about 20% of the crashes for 2.9.1 right now

I just emptied the 3.0 milestone on trac so we can start fresh.

I’ll start working on the roadmap next week, and everything should have it’s own ticket so we can easily keep track of the changes and progress.

Crash Report status for 2.9.1:

• Fixed freeze when picking photo from library [2239]
• Fixed crashes on iOS 4.0 [8.58% of crashes] [2236]
• Maybe fixed crash when memory warning issued while adding/selecting categories [4% of crashes] [2240]
• Try to avoid crash on weird cases when picking a photo [2.47% of crashes]. Can’t reproduce, but I’ve tried to make it not crash on unexpected values [2241]

Unsolved crashes:

• There’s a Safari bug on iOS 4.0 which makes WebCore crash [5.29% of crashes]. New version of the reader in 2.9.1 will at least not make it happen when users are somewhere else in the app, but will still crash when loading the articles that trigger that bug. That would also help pinpoint what the bug actually is
• The crash on ojbc_msgSend [4.47% of crashes]. We’ve had this one for a long time, and happens in very random places. At least users are now giving more details of what they were doing when app crashed. Cleanup and NSOperation in 3.0 will probably help getting rid of this one
• NSObjectInaccessibleException [3.17% of crashes]. In some edge cases, the app tries to show a comment which has been deleted (or marked as spam). It looks like it happens when the app was in the background and just launched opening a comment.
• The “Deallocation Problem” (more info) [2.59% of crashes]. Nasty bug which happens when a UIViewController does something on the background and gets released before the background thread is finished. That causes dealloc to be called from a background thread which is fatal when you have a UIWebView. Let’s move to NSOperation and stay away from performSelector* on 3.0