WordPress 2.9 – Update Success
This is the second day since WordPress 2.9 has officially been released. Normally, I wait a couple of weeks to upgrade. But this time I took the dive and the update went through seamlessly. In fact, I have seen a lot of the same results via Twitter. Sounds like a lot of the bugs were worked out in beta. Way to go WordPress!
Of course, I did backup all my files and database just in case!
I will come back and post any plugin or widget conflicts as I hear them.
And how did your experience go?
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WordPress 2.9 Teaser
Okay, just a quick post to let you know a couple of features to expect in 2.9. I just uploaded the beta version and hope to come back soon with more to share.
THE TRASH CAN – When you delete a post, page, category, comment, or any bit of content, it is moved to the Trash where you can decide whether to pull it back at a later date.
IMAGE EDITOR – ALTHOUGH SIMPLE… Image editing will allow bloggers to crop, scale and rotate images from right within WordPress.
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Changing Your Page Title in the Nav Bar
You create a page. You title it “About Joe Smith,” which is what you want it to say on the page. But in your nav bar, you just want “About”. Here is a simple way around this problem.
First you will need to install the plugin All In One SEO Pack. This is a great plugin and one you should be using anyway. I’m not going to use this post to tell your all it’s features, but do check it out.
Once installed and enabled, you will find this box at the bottom of every post and page you create. But you will only see this line for your pages.
Menu label:
Simply type in what you want to appear in your nav bar, save and presto!
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Grade Your Website
Recently a colleague suggested I check out the site Website Grader. It’s a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
Interesting results. Out of 100, our site was graded a 92. Whoopee!
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New Image Widget
I have in the past given you steps to create an image in your sidebar using the text widget.
Well, today WordPress just came out with a new Image Widget, that solves that problem. Now it’s easy to add an image to your sidebar
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WordPress.com stats every month
I normally don’t approve of simply doing a copy and paste for my blog, but this time I am going to make an exception.
Do you know that every month WordPress.com lists their stats under the “news” tab? Although the numbers may not affect you directly, they are impressive.
So for August ‘09, here they are:
- 426,047 blogs were created.
- 4,560,168 posts were published.
- 455,423 new users joined.
- 6,658,426 file uploads.
- 3990 gigabytes of new files.
- 787 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
- 8,379,530 comments.
- 7,498,064 logins.
- 2,153,498 active blogs and 22,855,350 active posts, where “active” means they had a human visitor.
- 1,267,201,336 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,296,959,079 on self-hosted blogs (2,564,160,415 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
- 1,567,468,503 words.
That, my friend, is a heck of a lot of blogging!
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WordCamp Seattle 09
Just a quick note to let everyone know that WordCamp Seattle on Sept. 26th is open for registration. Sign up before it sells out!
http://www.wordcampseattle.com/2009/08/registration-open-now/
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I Survived My 2.8 Update!
Just had to do a quick post as I finally made the move to update to version 2.8. From past experience, I have found it useful not to jump on the bandwagon and update the minute the new version comes out. It’s pretty much my practice across the board with most hardware and software.
I did take the time to read other horror stories via Twitter and LinkedIn, took note of all the disappointments and frustrations, and basically, sat back and waited. Nearly 30 days later, with some of the bugs worked out, on the day after the 4th of July, I decided to take the plunge.
I anticipated similar fireworks and explosions that had been a constant for the past two days.
Fortunately, it didn’t happen.
Like a good WordPress neurotic, I:
- backed up my files (although I do use WP-Dbmanager plugin for auto updates)
- turned off all of my plugins and updated them — several had updated versions for 2.8, lucky me (and yes all 14 plugins)
- clicked my auto install update
- activated plugins again
- and presto, my site worked like a charm, and 2.8 was active
I must note that we do use a premium theme from StudioPress that survived the update without a glitch.
(Heavy sigh). Now it’s off to update client sites. So far 3 updated, and things are good.
If you updated recently, let me know how it went for you!
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WordPress 2.8 is Officially Released
As of Wed., June 10th, WordPress 2.8 is out. There are some nice new features, nothing major, but worth checking out.
If you are on WordPress.com, you are updated automatically.
If you have your WordPress on your own server, when updating, remember to:
- Backup your database and files before updating.
- If you are using a free theme or a paid premium theme, find out if they have made it WordPress 2.8-compatible. If they haven’t, try the update, but again remember to backup. If your theme has issues, upload the old files again and wait till your theme is updated before going to 2.8 again.
- If you do need to update your theme, and you had someone customize it, talk to them before installing the updated version of your theme.
- After updating, if your blog or website starts having problems, deactivate any plugins one by one to see if that is what’s causing the issue.
- Check your widgets and make sure they are working with the new version.
And finally, don’t feel you have to update right away. Make sure you eventually do it, but you don’t need to be the first one on your block!
If anyone else has suggestions or insights, please feel free to comment.
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A Peek at Some WordPress Beta 2.8 Features
WordPress Beta 2.8 has been out for a bit and I have finally taken some time to look at the new features. There’s some good stuff there! I won’t take the time to go through them all, but here are some that are worth highlighting.
THEMES
Now you can upload themes through the admin panel. In 2.7 and older, you needed to use FTP clients. And since there are a lot of WordPress users out there that don’t get “ftp” they limited themselves to the preinstalled themes. And an added benefit: now you can browse themes and search via keywords, and also apply filters too based on width, colours and columns. In addition the management of themes has improved. Before, you had to select the theme you wanted, and then either press activate or close after viewing a preview of the theme. Now you get options to activate immediately if you want, and also to delete the theme if you want as well.
WIDGETS AND PLUGINS
Although there isn’t any major change to the widget view, it it a lot cleaner and easier to use. As far as plugins, you can now edit them from within your editor. If a plugin is not working well, and you have the know how in coding, you can tweak it in order to get it working correctly.
COMMENTS
The new option to edit individual comments from the edit post selection saves a bit of time to do the standard delete, spam and reply to comments.
DASHBOARD
Again, just a bit making things a bit easier, you can now change the look of your dashboard and can set the number of columns that you want to be shown. Anything from one to four columns is allowed.
NOTE: If you are on the free WordPress.com, some of the features are not available.
So that’s just a quick preview. There is a whole bunch of other changes and improvements, but for most WordPress users, these are the one’s that will be more obvious. Not sure when we are looking at for the full release, but the Beta version does seem pretty stable. In any case, it’s just around the corner.
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