Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

Memolane is an web application that turns all of your tweets, facebook posts, picasa pictures, youtube videos etc. into a timeline that you can easily search. Alongside the currently supported services such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Last.fm, Foursquare, Instagram, Tripit, YouTube, myspace, vimeo and wordpress, you can also add RSS-feeds.

What is Memolane?

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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.

Everybody who followed our previous advice to upgrade, please upgrade again, especially if you have remote publishing activated.

While others need not worry immediately, it’s always a good idea to install security upgrades. You can download the latest version from their site.

As always, and since version 3, upgrading should be relatively pain-free (just go to your Dashboard and hit the upgrade link). According to their site, here’s why you should upgrade:

This release fixes issues in the remote publishing interface, which under certain circumstances allowed Author- and Contributor-level users to improperly edit, publish, or delete posts.

These issues only affect sites that have remote publishing enabled.

For many people a blog has become almost synonymous with WordPress. Running your own version, rather than going through WordPress.com, has a couple of advantages. As in: you have full control over everything. Change your theme? Add plugins? Some widgets, perhaps? Tweaking the code to suit your needs? All of it is possible… It’s become so powerful that by now it’s become much more than just a blogging system: you can run a full-fledged website in it, if you want, all of it with the same ease of use that we’ve naturally come to expect from WordPress.

And the good news is that those nice folks at WordPress.org (the organization which offers you the downloadable version of their software) have released a new version.

Here’s what’s new, according to their site:

WordPress 3.0.2 is available and is a mandatory security update for all previous WordPress versions. Haiku has become traditional:

Fixed on day zero
One-click update makes you safe
This used to be hard

This maintenance release fixes a moderate security issue that could allow a malicious Author-level user to gain further access to the site, addresses a handful of bugs, and provides some additional security enhancements. Big thanks to Vladimir Kolesnikov for detailed and responsible disclosure of the security issue!

Since version 3, upgrading should be relatively pain-free (just go to your Dashboard and hit the upgrade link). If you happen to work for an organization where the system administrator doesn’t know how to manage a server park properly, though, and the upgrades aren’t possible due to server configuration mistakes (and we don’t have any specific organization in mind here, COMU), you can always download 3.0.2 and do the upgrade manually.

WordPress 3.0 has been released for quite a while now, but you know what we’re really missing out on, over here at Let’s Learn IT? We want *integration* ! Why is there still no plugin (that works) which can connect this site with, say, Facebook or so?

Ping.fm has support for the wordpress.com sites, but not for the wordpress.org sites (which is what we use). They’ve promised us that they’re working on a solution, though. Nice folks, those at Ping.fm.

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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