I noticed in the admin dashboard this morning that a new minor release of WordPress, the blogging system I use. So, I dutifully downloaded the package and upgraded things. Like previous upgrades, it went fairly smoothly, except for a small problem with the way it was rendering dates on entries. For example, today’s date was being rendered as 2${1}June 2006.

After checking to make sure it wasn’t something I’d done, I started comparing the code from the new version of WordPress with the previous version and quickly found the offending piece of code around line 35 in wp-includes/functions.php. I checked the 5 lines of code in question back to the way they were in the previous version and everything started working properly again.

So, I checked the WordPress website to see if it had been reported by others and, sure enough, about 8 people had posted messages about it, but no one had come up with a solution. I posted my solution and almost immediately other people started posting messages that it had worked for them, too.

Were I running the latest and greatest version of PHP on the server, the code in 2.0.3 would have worked as expected. But I’ve long given up running bleeding edge releases. Changes in code like this should take into consideration slightly older versions of software. This could have been avoided with a simple if statement.

Still, this is the first real annoyance I’ve experienced since I started using WordPress, so I can’t complain about it that much.