Monthly Archives: June 2010

How are you finding WordPress 3.0?

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Well, WordPress 3.0 has been around for a couple of weeks now and I’m hoping you’ve all upgraded your blogs. I’m curious to know how you’re faring with it. Personally, I’ve had no problems at all, even rolling it out to different blogs. I haven’t had much chance to use many of the new features, but it’s great to know they’re there if I need them.

I know there are a number of videos that can show you the new features down at WordPress.TV, it’s no HDTV, but it’s a great way to learn about your favourite platform. Check it out!

Speed up your site with WP Super Cache

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Here’s a plugin you really need to know about if you have a popular site. It’s called WP Super Cache and is the best way to handle a surge of traffic that could bring your servers to their knees. The plugin works by generating a static HTML version of your page, which can be served to a user at a fraction of the machine load of a normal PHP page. When a user hits the site, the page is generated, handed to them and kept in storage in case another user turns up asking for the same page.

It’s pretty useful if you have lots of traffic and can make your website leaner and meaner than any diet pills you know about. Check it out if you’re expecting your site to be popular!

Fixing: Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance

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If you’ve been keeping on top of your WordPress updates using the automatic upgrade feature, you may have run into a problem immediately after upgrading. A message that prevents access to any page on your blog, “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute”. This can happen particularly if your upload hasn’t completed correctly and returned an error.

Cause of the Maintenance Message

During an automatic upgrade, WordPress places a file in the blog root directory called “.maintenance” to prevent visitors from being confronted with ugly, broken pages during the upgrade process. That’s a great little built-in feature, but if the upgrade gets interrupted or fails for any reason, that file doesn’t get deleted and nobody, including you, can access your blog.

Removing the Maintenance Message

All you have to do is delete the .maintenance file from the blog root directory. Simple as it gets. After you’ve deleted the files you should be able to access the site just fine, but you may have to run the automatic upgrade again.

Simple isn’t it, no need to get sweaty pal,s and have to break out the hand dryers. Funny how sometimes the solution is really simple, isn’t it?

WordPress 3.0 is here!

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It’s been released! WordPress 3.0 has hit the streets and is ready for everyone to download. It comes with a whopping 1217 bug fixes from the previous version and has a bunch of new awesome features. Theme designers can now allow custom menus, there’s the ability to create new post types and headers and backgrounds can now be configured using functionality that’s baked into the WordPress core.

The best bit however is the combined core between WordPress and WordPress MU. This means that you can start with a single site installation and grow it into a multi user site. So you can start with a wedding site, and grow a new blog on wedding clothes, one on wedding napkins and one on wedding flowers.

Downloading WordPress 3.0 here

New version of WP Auction Lite

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I’ve just dropped another version of WP Auctions Lite, to correct a small bug that was displaying a warning message whenever a page is loaded. It’s quite fortunate that WordPress supports the ability to tell you automatically if there’s a new drop of a plugin you’re using. It’s easy for me to push out a new version regardless of whether it’s a feature change or a bug fix.

It’s a great little plugin that lets you sell anything you like, from coconuts all the way to Lipovox. Give it a try if you want to turn your blog into a fully fledged auction machine. If you like it, you may even want to consider purchasing WP Auctions Pro, the premium version with a bunch more features.

What’s happening with WordPress MU

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Have you ever used WordPress MU? It’s the multi user version of WordPress that lets you create a blog for every user who registers with the site. It’s a big favourite, especially for people who want to offer the ability to others to create their own blogs, as it doesn’t cost anything extra to have another blog on the site (no incremental cost).

Well, with WordPress 3.0, WordPress and WordPress MU are being merged together. You’ll have a feature so that any standard blog can be turned into what’s called a Multisite configuration. So it doesn’t matter if your blog is about hosting or about the best acne treatment, you can now convert your site into one that supports multiple blogs with a pretty simple process.

Great comments on WordPress

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I came across a post today that collects comments from a number of people who rated WordPress as one of the top tools they’ve used online. Here are some of them:

  • Amazing and simple tool to reweb your site. Very SEO friendly. Corinne Burkhert
  • I now have two WordPress blogs and though they are quite challenging to maintain, I love the availability of plugins and themes – Open Source at its best. Frances Bell
  • I manage class discussions out of class and provide additional information here following classes that students find difficult; if I am absent, this is where I can teach “remote class” (hasn’t happened yet) Sarah Davis
  • We use the self-hosted version for the company blog and dozens of WordPress.Com ones for learners. Great for encouraging reflections on their learning.Leia Fee

That’s just a few of them, there are loads more where they came from. You can use the page a bit like an mmf drawer where you store your snippets. If you ever need to reach in and pull out an idea why WordPress is awesome, just dig in.

Is your WordPress version up to date?

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Do you realise how many WordPress installations running out there are running on old versions of WordPress? There are many out there and being on an older version exposes you to different exploits and other baddies out there. Upgrades are like vitamins for WordPress, you need them to stay healthy. Newer versions of WordPress even have an upgrade functionality built into them, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it.

So, check out the version of WordPress you’re on. If you’re not on v2.9.2 at the moment, then you need to upgrade. If you are, it will let you know when there’s a new version out!

WordPress is 7!

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Did you know that WordPress is 7 years old? I was reading a post called Lucky Seven on the WordPress blog that talks about how the first release of WordPress was 7 years ago. And it’s now supported by a growing community of over 1,500 people contributing code and other artefacts to WordPress.

It doesn’t matter if your blog is about teeth or about cheap insurance quotes, the reality is that we owe the platform we’re running on to the efforts of those 1,500 people, and to the leadership that pulls all their efforts together. So enjoy WordPress, but remember all the people who make this platform great!

Ask your WP Questions

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I came across an interesting website recently called WP Questions. It’s a questions and answer site about WordPress that lets people ask questions about problems they have and lets experts answer the questions. The site has a money-based model around it, where the people asking questions can post a bounty that gets given to the person who solved their problem.

It’s a great way to get some feedback about a problem you may be having with WordPress and a great way for experts to get their name out there. So, whether you have a plugin that’s giving you issue, or some information on those noxycut reviews that aren’t posting correctly; or even a theme issue that is puzzling you. If so, head down to WP Questions and see how it can solve your problems.

I might give it a whirl one of these days .. if I can ever find the time!