WordPress 3.0 is finally officially released (a few days ago, actually — I’m sure you’ve heard already). This latest and greatest version of our favorite blog/CMS software sports many new and improved features. I discussed several of them a couple of months ago when I upgraded this site to 3.0-beta, but let’s review some of the improvements anyways:
This may be kind of short notice, but those of you near Atlanta might be interested in the Business of WordPress Conference, taking place next week (June 22-23, 2010). The venue is the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Conference Center, on 14th Street (Midtown). This conference is aimed at non-technical users who are interested in learning more about the benefits of using WordPress to drive a business web site. Over the past few decades the web … Continue reading
Recently, Arlen Beiler created a proposal for a WordPress Answers site on the in-progress StackExchange network, which is part of StackOverflow. If you aren’t familiar with StackOverflow or any of its sister-sites, it’s a sort of Questions and Answers forum where good answers are voted up, and float to the top. There is also a reputation system which rewards users for being active and providing quality feedback. I was not previously an active member on … Continue reading
By default, the “Other WordPress News” widget in your WordPress Dashboard only updates twice a day (every twelve hours). Personally, I like to get updates quicker than that. I check my Dashboard several times a day to see if there’s some new post that I should know about. So I set mine up to update every two hours. Frequently enough to keep me more up-to-date, but not so frequently that it might be annoying to … Continue reading
Dries Buytaert re-tweeted a couple of interesting things on Twitter earlier today. First was this one: RT @chx1975: WordPress is now approximately where Drupal was around Drupal 5 w/ content types. See you in 2015. Ouch. Okay, so we’re late to the game where custom content types are concerned. But I doubt it will take us until 2015 to catch up. But Dries is even-handed, and calls fair game when someone retorts in favor of … Continue reading
This Geolocation Plugin will be a nice addition for people who do travel blogging or who write about things in a particular area (restaurant and business reviews, hyperlocal news, etc). The plugin adds a subtle but powerful addition to posts you’ve geotagged using WordPress for iPhone: a link appears inside your post with a short description of the location where the post was tagged. When your users hover over the link, an interactive map appears … Continue reading
Yesterday, I discovered that the demo at the bottom of my FancyBox Gallery plugin page was broken. After a little research, I discovered that a third-party javascript was the culprit. I’ve disabled that script for now, and alerted the service provider to the problem. So, my apologies if you came to the page and got the impression that the plugin didn’t work well. In a related note, I’ve been working (slowly) on some updates to … Continue reading
I know there are some efforts to integrate forums with WordPress. Of course there’s bbPress, which can share user logins. And there is the Simple:Press plugin, which seems pretty full-featured. And I have heard references to other efforts for plugins, or integrations for external forum systems. The main problem with external forum systems (as opposed to solutions purely based on plugins and themes) is that if you want a consistent look-and-feel between your blog and … Continue reading
The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice) Most good open source projects attract an audience of supporters. When the buzz around the project reaches a certain point, it will also pull in detractors. We commonly use the term “community” to describe the group of people discussing the project. Mostly we mean the supporters, but it really includes anybody with an interest in the project, good or bad. When you … Continue reading
For a while now, I’ve had an email signup form in the sidebar (look, over there on the right), and a few people have taken advantage of it. This allows you to receive an email notification whenever there are new posts here on my blog. Until now, these emails have been driven by FeedBurner. However, I’ve now moved them over to MailChimp. This will give me more control over the formatting of the emails (I … Continue reading