Not All Bloggers are Thrilled with Wordpress 2.5
Over on the Upgrading Wordpress with Fantastico post Francois asked “Do you think it is really necessary to upgrade in the first place?”
Well, the short response is that after reading a number of posts from webmasters who have done the Wordpress 2.5 upgrade, I’m more inclined to believe that my penchant for keeping things simple really pays off. (Although I’m already using WP 2.5 on a couple of smaller, very simple blogs; I haven’t yet updated my larger blogs such as NPT).
WebBlogToolsCollection has posted a FAQ on Wordpress 2.5 that answers a big whack of questions about the new version, and many of the 67 commentors to date have added still more questions to the already sizeable list.
The biggest complaint around the blogosphere seems to be that the widgets don’t work for some bloggers who use multiple column templates. One might assume that they are using templates not yet verified as being compatible with WP 2.5. However, even templates that were listed as compatible on the Wordpress site were later discovered not to work completely with the latest version.
Ergo, my statement about simplicity above. I don’t bother using widgetized sidebars and prefer instead to hardcode elements so that they will work regardless of template compatibility… and goodness knows that I like to tinker with templates! 
So, to answer your question, Francois — if you are uncertain about whether or not you should upgrade at this point, it’s probably best to wait — especially if you’re not big into tweaking and want something that works ‘out of the box’.
Here’s some sage advice that Jon of Ninja Blog Setup left as a comment on the earlier post:
For major upgrades, like the one just released from 2.3.3 to 2.5 it is advisable to wait a couple weeks to allow plugin authors a chance to test and revise any problems in their plugins, but with minor upgrades, like from 2.3.2 to 2.3.3, which are often security related, these should be done ASAP and the Instant Upgrade plugin works fantastically.
Hope that helps!
Premium News Themes Compatible with Wordpress 2.5
Phew!
I think I heard the huge collective sigh of relief from bloggers the world over this morning when they checked their email and read that their Premium News Themes are compatible with Wordpress 2.5.
Here is a portion of the blurb that Adii sent out:
We are happy to announce that all of our Premium News Themes (Original, NewsPress, Flash News, Gazette Edition & Live Wire) is compatible with WordPress 2.5 and that you can upgrade to the new version (of WP) without worrying about any incompatibilities.
The only incompatibility we found, whilst testing was related to the Popularity Contest plugin. According to the plugin author, he is working on a fix and will release an updated, WP2.5-compatible version soon. Unfortunately we can’t update the plugin accordingly and thus take no responsibility if you upgrade to WP2.5 and find that the plugin doesn’t work.
Oh well, no great loss. I suppose we can all live without the Popularity Contest plugin for awhile… much better than finding out that your sidebar ends up in the header in Firefox or something equally horrific.
BTW, I use Adii’s Premium News Theme on my RosalindGardner.com blog and will be upgrading to Wordpress 2.5 as soon as it is available through Fantastico.
Upgrading Wordpress with Fantastico
Evelyn Grazini commented on upgrading Wordpress with Fantastico yesterday, saying “One word of warning though for those who upgrade. DO NOT do it through Fantastico in your cpanel“.
Although it will probably be a couple of weeks before the new Wordpress 2.5 release shows up in Fantastico, I’m more than happy to wait for it and do the installation from there. (I did a manual installation of the new version to another blog, so I still get to play with it in the meantime.)
I do however take a few precautions when doing the upgrade through cPanel and Fantastico, and have never had a problem. First, I make sure that the database has been backed-up and then revert to the default theme and de-activate all my plugins. Once the update has been installed, I change back to my current theme and re-activate the plugins one-by-one, making sure that each works as it should.
If the prospect of ending up with a ‘bunch of weird characters’ (or worse) still has you worried, there are detailed instructions on the Wordpress Codex about how to do a backup and upgrade your Wordpress installation manually.
Wordpress 2.5 Officially Released
WordPress 2.5 was officially released on March 29th - this past Saturday. Although I said in an earlier post that I wasn’t brave enough to test the beta version, I did in fact end up working with it for a couple of days last week and absolutely love the new interface and functionality.
Here is the release announcement at Wordpress.org which includes notes on all the upgrades and improvements as well as a link to the download page. Enjoy!
Have You Updated Your ShareThis Plugin?
Back in late February MySpace released a new posting API and shortly afterwards, ShareThis included a MySpace posting choice on their social web tab (shown left) that uses the new API, and gives you an easy way to post anything to your MySpace page.
ShareThis also advises that soon you’ll be able to “Post anything on the web to your Blogger, TypePad, Twitter, LiveJournal, and Orkut” and have the ability “to put ShareThis buttons on flash players”.
ShareThis currently supports the following sites:
- blinkList
- del.icio.us
- digg
- Google Bookmarks
- Mixx
- My WebWindows Live
- MySpace
- newsvine
- Propeller
- StumbleUpon
- Technorati
- Yahoo!
You can pick up the ShareThis plugin here.
How to Correct Bulleted List Errors with CSS
I’ve been running across more and more bulleted list errors on webpages of late. An unordered bulleted list should be coded as follows:
<UL>
<LI>1st Item</LI>
<LI>2nd Item </LI>
<LI>3rd Item</LI>
</UL>
The resulting bulleted list will appear like this:
- 1st Item
- 2nd Item
- 3rd Item
However, I frequently see this awful looking mess on webpages and blogs:
<p class=”MsoNormal”><!–[if !supportLists]–><!–[endif]–> 1st Item</p>
<p class=”MsoNormal”><!–[if !supportLists]–><!–[endif]–> 2nd Item</p>
<p class=”MsoNormal”><!–[if !supportLists]–><!–[endif]–> 3rd Item</p>
Why is that happening?
Well, in a nutshell, those bloggers are probably using Microsoft Word to create their posts, which they then convert into HTML code and copy and paste into to their blogs.
That method might work but for the fact that none of the CSS (cascading style sheets) on the sites showing the errors specified paramaters for rendering either a <UL> (unordered list) or a <LI> (list item).
At very least, the following code should be placed within their stylesheets:
ul li {
display: inline;
list-style-type: none;
}
To learn more about CSS and coding for bulleted lists, visit the W3Schools site.
Chomping at the Bit for Wordpress 2.5
On March 18th, Matt Mullenweg posted a sneak peak of Wordpress 2.5 that talked about a “customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times” and included a few screenshots of the new Dashboard, Navigation, Write and Manage Panels. Judging by the number of pingbacks (583 at time of writing), there’s a lot of excitement about the upcoming version of Wordpress.
Today, Matt tantalized us further with a short screencast that shows the new dashboard and how the gallery image uploader works.
For the adventurous, there’s also the option to download and install Release Candidate 2 of WordPress 2.5.
While I’m not that adventurous - at least not with this and my revenue-generating blogs - I’m chomping at the bit to see Wordpress 2.5 made available for upgrade through Fantastico, as I’m particularly looking forward to the one-click plugin updates that are included in the new version.
How to Exclude a Blog Category from Displaying
For example, because there is already a separate list of videos on the homepage at RosalindGardner.com, I didn’t want the videos to show up again in the “Most recent entry posted” featured at the top of the page.
So, to eliminate the Videos category from that section, I first look go to Manage > Categories in my Wordpress Administration panel and look for the category ID, which turns out to be #10.
I open the home.php template (you might be using index.php) and add cat=-10 to the code for the most recent post as follows:
< ?php $recent = new WP_Query("showposts=1&cat=-10"); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
Note the minus sign in front of the category number.
If you want to eliminate more than one category from the display, simply separate each category ID number with a comma, such as: &cat=-10,-22 .
Polling Plugin for Wordpress Blogs
Back in January, I added Polls to this site and have since tried a few different platforms.
For the first poll, “What is Your Biggest Internet Marketing Challenge?“, I used a third-party service called Vizu. Because I chose the free poll option, the polls shows a ‘Powered by Vizu‘ link at the bottom of the poll. As the poll is hosted on their server, that’s a fair deal. However, because I don’t like sending traffic off-site if I don’t have to and have a mountain of bandwidth with which to play on my server, I kept looking for a self-hosted polling plugin for Wordpress.
I came across the Democracy plugin, which was really easy to set up and deploy for my “How Many Web Sites Do You Operate?” poll. IP addresses can be logged to stop multiple voting and you can store an archive of polls. What you cannot do with the Democracy plugin however is run more than one poll at a time, so I kept on looking for a self-hosted polling option that allows multiple polls.
By the time I wrote the 3rd poll - How Often Do You Post to Your Blog? - I had found Lester Chan’s WP-Polls plugin, which along with his WP-Polls Widget, adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog that lets you run multiple polls.
WP-Polls lets you customize the look and feel of your polls using templates and there are number of other options from which to choose. The software allows users to select more than one answer and you can assign a maximum number of answers. You may also assign a start and end date for your poll, so if you get really ambitious, you can write a number of different polls to be queued up and published later to your blog.
The only additional feature that I would like to see in this plugin is a fill-in-the-blank option for those instances where the answer hasn’t been provided and readers would like to add more information. Other than that, WP-Polls is pretty much the perfect poll option.
Are you using WP-Polls or other polling software on your blog that you especially like (or dislike) and would like to mention? Please leave a comment and let others know!
How to Find Your Feedburner ID
Your Wordpress theme or a plugin may ask you for your Feedburner ID which is NOT the name that is appended to your Feedburner URL, i.e. http://feeds.feedburner.com/affiliateblogs.
The ID is a numeric sequence such as 298492. To find your ID:
- Login to your Feedburner account
- Click on My Feeds
- Click on the name of the appropriate feed (if you have more than one)
- Click on Publicize.
- Scroll down to Email Subscriptions in the left navigation.
- Select the Feedburner radio button and then click on Activate.
Activation will generate an HTML email subscription link for you to place on your blog and which contains your Feedburner ID, such as:
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=875817&loc=en_US which renders as Subscribe to The Affiliate Blog by Email.
Note that the feed ID in this particular case is 875817.
