Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Blog Archives

WordPress 2.7 Released

Well, that didn’t take long 🙂 With a few last minute fixes since Release Candidate 2, WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” is officially released. This is probably one of the most ambitious releases to date, in particular due to the radically redesigned backend interface. After much testing and feedback, I think the team has given us a very professional looking, flexible, and consistent interface that should serve us for the foreseeable future. Besides the new user interface, … Continue reading

WordPress 2.7 RC 2

WordPress 2.7 RC 2 is now available. There have been nearly 150 bugfixes since RC1, including improvements to the backend styling, RTL fixes, core and plugin updater fixes, improvements to categegory and tag handling, and much more. Barring any major new bugs being discovered, this will likely be the last release candidate before the official 2.7 release. Huzzah!

WordPress 2.7 Coming Soon!

WordPress die-hards everywhere are anxiously awaiting the official release of WordPress 2.7, which should be very soon now. A few days ago, WordPress 2.7 RC 1 was announced, and this Friday, Automattic will roll out the latest code on wordpress.com to help flush out any remaining issues that need to be addressed. I’ve been running the new code here for about a month, and I love how much more professional the backend interface looks now. … Continue reading

WordPress 2.6.5 Released

The WordPress team released WordPress 2.6.5 earlier today. This release addresses a potential XSS (cross-site scripting) attack under some server configurations, plus adds some bugfixes for some other minor issues. As noted in the official announcement, there was no official 2.6.4 release. There was an attempt to fool people into downloading a fake release under that number, so it has been skipped in the official release numbering, to avoid confusion. I would like to take … Continue reading

WordPress for Business Bloggers sample chapter

As a followup to my review of the book WordPress for Business Bloggers, I am able to make a sample chapter available to my readers. This is chapter 5, “Content is King.” This chapter shows that while the book does focus on business blogging, much of the advice is applicable to any type of blog. This section covers suggestions on writing good headlines, post length and frequency, using categories and tags, creating an “About” page, … Continue reading

Mac bootup sound ringtone for iPhone

This is from an inside joke here at the Microsoft Web Developer Summit, but if you’d like to have the Mac bootup sound as a ringtone on your iPhone, here ya go!

Book Review: WordPress for Business Bloggers

I recently received a copy of the book WordPress for Business Bloggers, by Paul Thewlis, published by Packt Publishing. The preface states, “WordPress for Business Bloggers provides advanced strategies and techniques to take your WordPress business blog from average to extraordinary. Whether you already have a blog, or are still in the planning stages, this book will show you how to use WordPress to create a highly successful blog for your business.” Read on to … Continue reading

WordPress iPhone App beta testing

Do you use WordPress? Do you have an iPhone? Or do you just like beta testing cool apps? You could help beta-test the upcoming WordPress for iPhone 1.2 release. The catch is, you can’t test unreleased apps on an actual iPhone. Instead, you have to download the (free) SDK, and run the code in the iPhone simulator. A lot of work to go through, to be sure, but if you’ve got time on your hands, … Continue reading

Socializing a WordPress site

For this week’s WordPress Wednesday installment, let’s look at a few changes I’ve made here on this site in the past few weeks. As mentioned previously, there were several areas that I knew I wanted to go ahead and improve in the short term, as interim measures until I put a whole new theme in place. One of my primary goals here is gain and retain readers. I want to make the site “sticky” by … Continue reading

WordPress themes for developers

This is the article that I had originally intended to post last week, before I suffered a self-induced glitch which caused me to lose my work-in-progress. Thanks to my friend Geof Morris who prompted me to double-check my database for saved revisions. As it turns out, there was indeed a revision stored there which did not show up in the list of revisions given in the editor. That copy contained a fair amount of the … Continue reading