Saints and sinners all agree
Spanish is a lovin’ tongue
But she never spoke Spanish to me

The translation work at wordpress.com is going well. I present to you the wordpress.com Dashboard in Spanish (mostly).

In addition to the option that sets the language to use for the front page of your blog, each user will be able to choose the language they want to use for the admin interface. If your blog is Spanish but you want to use English in the admin interface, you can do that. Each user gets to choose the language they want to see in the admin.

This isn’t yet live on wordpress.com but should be soon. If you use wordpress.com and want to help with translation, head over to translate.wordpress.com and translate a few strings. This will help other wordpress.com users as well as the WordPress and bbPress communities in general.

Update: Spanish is now active. Not all themes have been translated, but the admin area has good coverage.  If you don’t want your admin to display in Spanish, visit your profile and change the Interface Language (Idioma de la interface).

TinyMCE 2.0.5, including the new spell checker, is in WP trunk. We auditioned this on WordPress.com for awhile and received lots of positive feedback. Over the history of WordPress, the number one most requested feature is WYSIWYG editing. We added that in 2.0 when we incorporated TinyMCE. With that down, the number one request became spell checking. A spell checker is a make or break feature for many people. So, here it is.

(This post not spell checked because I am a hard core. I dare you to find a single mispeling on this page.)

Thanks to Michael Adams AJAX is featured in more places in the WordPress admin. We use AJAX primarily to avoid page reloads when manipulating lists. When deleting posts, pages, categories, comments, or bookmarks, you will see the deleted object fade out of the list and vanish. No reload required. We do this in a few places in 2.0.x, but now we do it more comprehensively. See this tracking ticket for details. This change will be available in the next release of WordPress. Right now you can get it only by pulling the latest development bits out of the subversion repository.

And, yes, the admin pages degrade nicely when using less capable browsers. I can still administer my blog using my BlackBerry.

Owen and Robert have put together a nice cron implementation for WP.  Internally, this is used to schedule future posts.  It is also available to plugin authors who want to be able to schedule events.  Check out the in-progress API.

WP contributor “random” spotted a couple places where some small bits of code were causing slow downs disproportionate to their size. random provided patches for ent2ncr and smilies that resulted in a nice performance bump. Small code cleanups like this can have big results.

We have two new importers in the svn tree: Live Journal and dotclear. These will be in 2.0.1.

We’re fixing bugs in preparation for a 2.0.1 maintenance release. Watch the roadmap for bugfix activity. If you want to make sure your “favorite” 2.0 bug is fixed, join the testers list and download a nightly build.

Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system. WordPress 2.0 can make use of memcached by dropping in a special backend for the WP object cache. The memcached backend replaces the default backend and directs all cache requests to one or more memcached daemons. You must have a memcached daemon running somewhere for this to work. Unless you’re managing the server on which your blog is running, you probably can’t run a memcached daemon, making this backend useless to you. The memcached backend is targeted at ISPs and those running WPMU. If you are using WPMU and distributing DB requests across multiple servers, memcached will come in very handy. Using memcached for a single blog isn’t really worth it. In my tests, it was sometimes slower than using the default object cache backend.

To install, copy object-cache.php and memcached-client.php to your wp-content/ directory.

To configure, define $memcached_servers in wp-config.php. This is an array of host and ports to which to connect. By default, the backend attempts to connect to port 11211 on the localhost.

Example server config:

$memcached_servers = array('192.168.1.1:11211', '192.168.1.2:11211');

As has been mentioned elsewhere, WordPress 2.0 is in beta. We’ve kept it low key so far, but we’re getting a pretty good testing turn out nonetheless. Several little bugs have been shaken out since the first beta. If you are feeling adventurous, try it and share your beta experience in the Beta Forum or on the Testers List. As always with unreleased versions, don’t use it on your live site just yet. If you do, make a backup and be ready to rollback.

To keep track of bug fixes going into 2.0, watch the timeline. We’re fixing bugs pretty briskly and releasing new 2.0 release candidates as we go.

One of the big recent additions is the Persistent Object Cache. Objects such as pages, categories, options, and users are saved locally to disk so that WP doesn’t have to make a trip to the database. The object cache is completely pluggable, allowing hosts to tailor the cache to their particular usage and needs. Folks on the hackers and testers lists have been shaking out the bugs. The cache is looking pretty stable as of now.