Release Announcement for 1.0.5

[Jonathan Wilde]

Hi everybody,

I'm finally ready to call version 1.0.5 stable and release it. It has
many under-the-hood stability and security improvements. It supports
all of the versions of WordPress from 2.3 all the way up to the latest
development build. Most of all, it has support for the new Google
FeedBurner.

In addition to all of this, there's a new website for the plugin at
<http://www.speedbreeze.com/feed-stats>. It's easier to browse than
the
old page on my blog and features the Google Group.

Unfortunately, the issues regarding item stats in the Awareness API
have
not yet been resolved. Hopefully, this will be fixed quickly by
Google.

In this release:

* A new HTTP engine (Troy Wolf's class_http) that should offer
more consistency across WordPress versions.
* FeedBurner vs. Google FeedBurner detection code to ease the
transition to Google.
* Improved error messages.
* Templated CSS (to improve consistency across versions of
WordPress).
* CSS updates to make the plugin feel more at home in WordPress
2.7+.
* More robust detection of the availability of reach stats.
* The feed tester is now run in the domain of the WordPress
admin
panels. This should allow it to run under more configurations
of WordPress and improve security.
* External script access of internal PHP scripts is now blocked
(using the same method as CodeIgniter).
* Improved internal documentation.
* Proper ChangeLog documentation.
* A proper GPL COPYING file has been added.

This is only the beginning. Now that this plugin is starting to grow
in
size and complexity, my next two tasks are going to be to:

* Make unit-tests for the code. This should significantly
improve
code quality and stability of the plugin.
* Set up a bug/feature requests tracker. I realize that
http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org has a bug tracker, but I
think
it will be less confusing (and easier to manage) if I set up a
separate tracker for this project.

In future releases, I'm also working on several usability enhancements
and new features. I want to make this plugin even more powerful.

Cheers,
Jonathan