Posts Tagged ‘upgrade’

Only a couple of weeks before we’re starting our course on New Media and Web 2.0 applications, the people at WordPress.org have released Gershwin – the latest version of their tremendously popular WordPress. Version 3.2 not only brings us the completely new default theme Twenty Eleven,  it also brings us peace of mind.

The editor has a new Zen mode, where in full-screen mode all the buttons, bells and whistles disappear from the screen (until you move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen again, that’s when the most commonly used functions are accessible again). Like… this:

So tell us…seriously…what could be less distracting than a completely empty page, eh? (Okay, it may also be a bit intimidating if you have writer’s block, but let’s not go there. )

What’s new? Well…it’s a bit faster, again, support for PHP4, old versions of MySQL and Internet Explorer has (finally) been dropped. Without having done any benchmark tests, it feels like pages load somewhat faster, and the administration section seems to be snappier, too. It certainly looks cooler than in the previous version! The default Twenty Eleven theme gives you an idea of some of the possibilities of HTML5, and I’m sure that in the not-so-distant future we’ll see many more themes popping up everywhere that will make the most of HTML5.

And oh yeah, from now on they’ll start doing partial upgrades – no need to upload the entire installation anymore, every time there’s an upgrade. While we at LLIT don’t really have anything to complain about with our current provider, people working elsewhere might not be as lucky as us. (An example, you ask? Well… FTP’ing the contents of an archive as small as that of WordPress from the comfort of your home to the servers there can easily take 4 hours to complete. Obviously the auto-update function doesn’t work, for “security reasons”.)

So far, this upgrade has been a good one – no broken plugins, etc, and everything seems to work just a bit better. Again. I can’t wait to see what they’ve got planned for 3.3…

Last week a new version of WordPress was released – we’ve told you before how much we like it, and this upgrade promises nothing but more goodies, so it goes without saying that we were very curious to find out what all the twitter talk was about.

The procedure is simple: login into your WordPress installation, and hit that “Please update now” link. Well… Hold your horses for just a second. This release is just a bit different, you see…

What’s new?

This release features a lightning fast redesigned linking workflow which makes it easy to link to your existing posts and pages, an admin bar so you’re never more than a click away from your most-used dashboard pages, a streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels by default to create a simpler and less intimidating writing experience for new bloggers (visit Screen Options in the top right to get old panels back), and a refreshed blue admin scheme available for selection under your personal options.

There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

Check plugins

Sounds cool, eh? That’s what we thought, too. Before you go for the update, though, listen to our good advice just for a change, and check if your plugins are compatible already. If not, disable the ones that are not compatible with this release yet, and then upgrade. If you don’t, you’ll run into the same problems we had – you’ll get a very nice error thrown your way (Call to undefined function wp()) , which will crash your site completely. We’ve never run into problems before while updating WordPress, but this time we had to revert to the previous version to find out what had gone wrong, exactly. Not nice. Of course those fine people at WordPress can’t be held responsible for the coding of plugin authors – we get that.

A lot of the work put into this release takes place in the background. 820 issues have been fixed, and changes brought about by the new features (admin bar – really cool, the internal linking – finally, the post formats and custom post types, etc) clearly have a more than serious impact on existing plugins.

Solution?

The solution is easy: either you disable whatever is not compatible, and check by enabling them one by one, or you just wait for the authors to update their plugins. We’ll leave it up to you.

Joomla is back with a brand new version – 1.6, and it’s become more powerful, offering more control and more options than ever before. Developers will like the fact that the system went through a major code overhaul, making it even better for the production of websites, intranets and other applications for small, medium-sized and large companies. Simplicity is its strength, and with this version the Joomla team have taken a big step forward, staying well ahead of the rest of the competition.

Hundreds of volunteers contributed for months to bring you this wonderful piece of software, which is still freely available as open source software. Thanks a billion, all! Your work is greatly appreciated by this non-profit!

What’s new in Joomla 1.6?

• Better access control for viewing and editiong of content, with definable user groups and access levels.
• A completely user-configurable category structure (no more messing with sections!), allowing for simple or complex, multi-layered categories.
• Improved extension management, allowing you to install several extensions in one simple go, or to update existing extensions with a simple click of the button.
• Improved language support for the development of multilingual websites.
• Configurable start and end dates for the visibility of modules; more control over where modules are visible.
• New templates, and a semantic template markup, pleasing both to the eye and to search engines.
• More creative possibilities thanks to the template styles.
• Hundreds of other new functionalities to improve your workflow and productivity

You’ll understand that we won’t be rolling out a new version of our website just yet – we’ll wait until the application deadline for our Comenius & Grundtvig courses is over, if you don’t mind!

Those wonderful folks at Videolan have released a new version of the VLC Media Player. If you’re using an ATI graphics card, and you’ve got version 10.7 or higher of the Catalyst drivers installed, then VLC can use DxVA2 hardware acceleration as well.

What’s new in 1.1.5:

• 1000 Web-shows listing integrated inside VLC’s playlist, provided by Channels.com
• New Game Music Emu (GME) support
• Windows SMB security issue - VideoLAN-SA-1006
• Major updates in translations, and new translations in Asturian, Armenian and Modern Greek
• Mac/Power-PC port fixed in 1.1.4.1
• live .webm streams support
• GPU HD decoding using Intel IGP on Windows, using DxVA2
• Miscellaneous fixes on all Interfaces, Demuxers and Decoders modules
• Codecs updates

Get it while it’s still hot!

Okay, we know: you use Videolan‘s Media Player VLC (because you know what’s good for you), but what we don’t know is if you’re using Windows as well. If you are, then you might want to upgrade again, because some problems have been fixed:

A bit after the 1.1.3, an important security issue was discovery in most windows applications, and VLC is affected too. Since security issues matters, here is a new release, targeted for the Windows platform!

• Windows Dll loading security issue, in Qt4 and dmo modules – VideoLAN-SA-1005
• Fix for folders opening issue on Windows
• Updated translations

Go and get that upgrade, already!

Everybody’s favourite media player, VLC, has been upgraded to version 1.1.3. Everybody’s favourite music player? Sure! Because VLC can literally play just about any music or video file out there, and if it doesn’t play, then it’s most likely not music or film. It does so by using a series of internal codecs, so there’s no need to install any extra software, either: everything works straight out of the box.

Because this is an open source project, the volunteers behind this program have ported it to many different operating systems: Are you using Windows 2000 or something upwards of that, one of the various flavours of GNU/Linux, or MacOS X, perhaps…no problem: there’s a version for you. If your system is not supported, you can even get the source code and try to compile it yourself.

What is really fantastic is all the different kinds of input it supports. Sure, it can play something from your hard disk, but what about this: if you connect it to a DVB source (Digital Video Broadcasting, via your satellite receiver, your digital TV receiver, or cable TV), it will play that, too. Give it any kind of streaming media via the internet, and you make it happy. If there are subtitles available, it will show them, of course, and if there aren’t, you can always add them. You can even use VLC to send your own streaming music/video over the internet, but if you’re advanced enough to understand this, you probably already knew.

Are you still using Windows Media player? Will you please stop doing that immediately? Get this download, and you’ll thank us soon enough. And if you don’t know how to do that, we can always give you some tips.

Last week a minor update was released of WordPress 2.9, which itself was released halfway through December last year. So…what are the goodies brought to us in this shiny, new version? Well…if you are one of those people who find themselves throwing brilliant pieces of writing in the bin (and of course regretting having done so soon afterwards), then we have good news for you: 2.9 gives you the possibility for recovering postings from the bin. Images can be edited, too, and it has become easier to embed videos in posts.

This minor upgrade fixes 34 problems, and if you’ve experienced problems with any of these problems before, then now is a good time to do the update. And if you don’t want to download the upgrade, then you can always go upgrade automatically via the Tools > Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

WordPress, one of the better blog systems out there (so good that we at Let’s Learn IT are using it ourselves ), and probably the only blog system that you’ll have up and running on your server in 5 minutes or less, have upgraded their software to version 2.8.6.

The latest version can be downloaded from their site, and contains the following changes:

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