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Archive: Tag: WordPress

WordPress 2.7: Automatic Upgrade in Core!

August 11, 2008 ,

Accord­ing to Word­Press devel­op­er Ryan Boren, the most request­ed Word­Press fea­ture is ten­ta­tive­ly slat­ed for the as-yet unsched­uled 2.7 release.

This already exists in the form of a third-par­ty plu­g­in, which I’ve actu­al­ly used suc­cess­ful­ly before on anoth­er blog. I’ve always found upgrad­ing man­u­al­ly to be easy and prob­lem-free, though incred­i­bly tedious. Because I don’t use many plu­g­ins or alter any core Word­Press files, I think automat­ing the process will be a safe option for me, one that I’ll trust more in the hands of the core devel­op­ment team. Still, I’m sure I’ll wait till it’s been thor­ough­ly test­ed in a cou­ple ver­sions before using it on this site.

WordPress 2.5 – March 10

March 1, 2008

Wordpress 2.5 - Write Post

Word­Press 2.5 comes out in less than two weeks! I read some­thing about the “Media Uploader” on the devel­op­ment blog, and, curi­ous, I searched for more details, and came across this Word­Press 2.5 Beta demo site. The login name is admin and the pass­word is demo.

Aside from the stun­ning visu­al over­haul, there are sev­er­al imme­di­ate­ly notice­able vast improve­ments in some of the fea­tures:

  • Cus­tomiz­able thumb­nail (and medi­um) image sizes — this has been request­ed for­ev­er, and Word­Press final­ly lis­tened. Used to be that every image you uploaded was copied and resized to a width of 128 pix­els for auto­mat­ed thumb­nail cre­ation, which made a poten­tial­ly cool fea­ture vir­tu­al­ly use­less. Now they just need to intro­duce crop­ping.
  • Bet­ter pri­vate post pro­tec­tion — keep­ing posts pri­vate is so unin­tu­itive in Word­Press 2.3. The post needs to be marked as “Pri­vate” using a radio but­ton, but hit­ting the “Pub­lish” but­ton instead of the “Save” but­ton after edit­ing a pri­vate post stu­pid­ly dis­re­gards that pref­er­ence. Now pri­va­cy is indi­cat­ed by a check­box that flips pri­va­cy on and off and keeps it that way.
  • Tag man­age­ment — I guess we all knew this was com­ing. It seems like the devel­op­ers were so eager to get tag sup­port out the door that with 2.2 or what­ev­er it was they did­n’t mind that you could­n’t edit any of the tags you cre­ate when you pub­lish. Tag­ging a post just threw tags into the dark recess­es of the Word­Press data­base, where they became inac­ces­si­ble except as part of a tag cloud on your site. But now we have an inter­face to delete, add, and edit them just as we do cat­e­gories.

WordPress 2.5 - Media Uploader

It’s pret­ty sweet. The media uploader is par­tic­u­lar­ly awe­some. I can’t wait to install it. The design­ers still assume all their users can’t read fonts small­er than 16pt. I guess they’re try­ing to ensure they look Web 2.0 enough. And it looks like the Shut­tle Project isn’t going any­where after all.

Template Feed/Archive URL Structures for Various Blogging Platforms (Updating)

February 15, 2008 , , , , , , , , , ,

Being still very inter­est­ed in web feeds, both prac­ti­cal­ly and philo­soph­i­cal­ly, I sub­scribe to them often. Occa­sion­al­ly I’ll find a site that seems as though it should have a feed, but con­tains no link to one with­in a meta dec­la­ra­tion or with­in the body of the site. Still, most con­tent gen­er­a­tors gen­er­ate feeds, regard­less of whether their users make the feed URLs pub­lic. In cas­es like this, it’s fun to poke around and see if I can’t guess the cor­rect URL.

The same goes for archives; cer­tain Blog­ger users, for exam­ple, appar­ent­ly turn archive links off, so all that’s eas­i­ly vis­i­ble are the last ten posts or so on the front page. But, of course, as is espe­cial­ly the case with some­thing as pre­fab as Blog­ger, the archives are acces­si­ble through a very pre­dictable URL schema.

And what about com­ment feeds? These are even more scarce­ly linked to, but in many cas­es do exist.

Here are the ones I know so far. I plan to update this post as I dis­cov­er more. This is as much for my ref­er­ence as it is for yours. So, book­mark it, and, y’know, sub­scribe to the com­ments. If you know of any oth­er schema­ta, please com­ment. And if you’d like to cre­ate your own feeds from any site, give Feed43 a shot. It’s a bit tough to learn, but I’ve suc­cess­ful­ly made sev­er­al use­ful feeds with it.

MySpace

  • All blog posts: http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=[frien­dID]

Con­tin­ue →

Ta-Da

May 15, 2005 , ,

I’d been mean­ing to teach myself enough css, php, and sql to final­ly use Word­Press, a pow­er­ful, flex­i­ble blog­ging util­i­ty, cer­tain­ly more­so than Blog­ger. The process was faster than I had expect­ed, and I’m real­ly pleased with the results and look­ing for­ward to Word­Press’ poten­tial. Com­pare to my hind­sight­ed­ly hideous Blog­ger site. Yuck.

The migra­tion was easy enough, but the cus­tomiza­tion could­n’t have been pos­si­ble with­out these sites:

…and of course all the Word­Press doc­u­men­ta­tion and codex.

Like I said, there’s still much XHTML inva­lid­i­ty, due entire­ly to Blog­ger, but I’ll be fix­ing this slow­ly (stan­dards, stan­dards, stan­dards). Some for­mat­ting quirks I’ll be iron­ing out as well, so there may be vary­ing degrees of gar­bling in the near future. I could say more, but I won’t, but I will say, “If you’ve thought about switch­ing to Word­Press, do it, if for no oth­er rea­son than that you’ll learn so much about css and php in the process.”