3 More WordPress Plugins
Smilies Themer - Allows you to replace the default smilies in WordPress.
File Icons - File Icons adds icons via CSS to your links.
Firefox Detective - Displays a banner to IE users to download Firefox.
3 WordPress Plugins to Check Out
Impress - A plugin to help you share stats with your readers about things such as number of comments or number of words in all posts.
Kontera Integration - Allows you to choose on a post by post basis where you want Kontera ads to be displayed.
WPsyslog - Logs system events in your blog allowing the admin to analyze the state of his system.
WordPress 2.3 Finally Released
It was quite a few hours after I posted yesterday that WordPress finally released version 2.3 of its wonderful blogging software that I believe EVERYONE should be using.
I wanted to mention a few things that I didn’t in the last post about this update.
- Canonical URLs - “which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more.” (WordPress Blog) One of the more important features that I haven’t heard too much about, it seems that tagging has really dominated the conversations I’ve had with others about WordPress 2.3.
- Pending review - Allows writers on multi-author blogs to submit their post for review by an administrator or an editor.
- Advanced WYSIWYG - I may be the only one out there that isn’t using a desktop blog editor. I just feel that the WordPress admin panel is good enough for me, now WordPress is adding some enhancements to the editor which will make some things a lot easier to do while writing up posts.
There were 351 tickets in Trac closed with this release and over 100 people worked on the code. I think that WordPress is doing a wonderful job and continues to improve on an already amazing platform.
You can download the most recent version of WordPress here.
WordPress 2.3 Due Out Today
Although WordPress 2.3 is due out today there has not been a bit of mention of it in the news today, and it hasn’t shown up on wordpress.org either (note I’m writing this an hour or so before it will actually go up so things could change, I’ll try to update this post if things do). I’m looking forward to it however I’m not sure if there will be an immediate upgrade, mostly because I want to wait it out and make sure all of my plugins work before I go breaking things.
But, I know there are a lot of people out there waiting to get there hands on it (someone must be), so here is a list of places where you can go for some information on the upcoming release, what to do before you upgrade, things you need to know before you upgrade, etc.
- Blog Herald - WordPress Wednesday News
- Technosailor - 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.3
- WordPress Blog - Preparing for 2.3
- Weblog Tools Collection - WordPress 2.3 Features
- Weblog Tools Collection - Tagging Plugins for WordPress 2.3
- Rich Gilchrest - How To Add Wordpress 2.3 Tags To Your Current Theme
- boren.nu - WordPress 2.3 Database Schema Changes
Tagging and the updating of plugins really seems to be the only two features that any body seems to really care about. I personally don’t really care about tagging all that much because I feel that tagging is getting a little stale. And, as for the updating of plugins, I think that it is really cool, something I really think will be a much needed improvement. Now if they could make it a little bit easier to automatically update your WordPress install, they will really have something going.
Week of WordPress Themes Day 5 - The Morning After
The Morning After (No Live Demo)
This is an absolutely gorgeous theme, I love the colors, I love the layout, I just love it.
“The Morning After is a magazine-style theme for WordPress created by Arun Kale. The theme was created based on a brief survey on the WordPress forums about what people would want to see in a unique magazine-style theme.”
That is an interesting idea, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a theme created based on a survey. Here are some of the features the theme has:
- “Featured” post highlighting
- Associating images/thumbnails with recent posts
- Customisable logo/header image
- Easy CSS classes for adding captions and wrapping text around images in posts
- Asides
- Option for readers to email posts to friends
- Option to switch to a print-friendly view to print posts
I really do like this theme and I think that this is a great option for anyone who is looking for a new theme or looking for their first theme, especially since it can be used very as a beginner theme with plenty of bells and whistles that will let you grow without needing to add anything to the theme yourself.