WordPress is 7!

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Owen

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!

WordPress 3.0 RC

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Owen

The Release Candidate of WordPress 3.0 is now out for everyone to download and try. You may have seen the betas come available, but a Release Candidate is as close to the final version as you can get. In fact, if no major issues are uncovered, it will actually be the final release.

The reason behind a release candidate is that, although the software is tested on a variety of platform, there’s no way to mimic every possible combination of different requisites that WordPress relies on to work properly. So, this phase is crucial to gather an final information about what’s may or may not work to ensure as few problems as possible when the final version is released. So, whether you have a WordPress blog or a site about adult acne treatment, it’s always worth playing it safe and making sure it works on the latest release of WordPress.

Tried out Twenty Ten?

Posted on May 20, 2010 by Owen

: Image via CrunchBase

There’s a great new theme that’s the default theme for WordPress called Twenty Ten. It has some great features and goes a long way towards providing plain vanilla installs with a great look and feel that is also very customisable. There’s more about it down at the WordPress blog, but in the meantime, just knowing you get custom backgrounds and custom headers for your blog is definitely a step in the right direction as far as new users are concerned. You could have a blog about tatuaje cigars as far as the theme is concerned, if it looks good people will be happy and visit your website again.

WordPress Summer of Code 2010

Posted on March 24, 2010 by Owen

WordPress is taking part in Google’s Summer of Code 2010. It’s a programme that allows students to spend Summer working with an Open Source project, with Google paying the stipend for them if the “internship” is successful. WordPress is one of the 150 Open Source organisations taking part in the programme. As jobs go, I think that’s an awesome idea. We’ve all had crappy jobs as students; whether it’s washing cars or giving out leaflets for the best treatment for hemorrhoids, so being paid to code is great; and being able to contribute to some of the great Open Source projects of today.

If you’re interested, check out the post on the WordPress blog.

Did you go to the BBQ?

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Owen

: Image via Wikipedia

One of the disadvantages of not living in the US is that I don’t get to go to all the cool stuff. Last weekend, the WordPress team threw a BBQ that everyone was invited to. It was was WordPress fans attending SxSW, a conference I would have loved to go to. Still, going to a BBQ is probably not on the list of diets that work, but it does promise to be tons of fun.

So, anyone out there managed to go? What was it like? Did you meet all your heros?

WordPress for Android 1.0.2

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Owen

There’s a new version of the WordPress application for Android. Here are the improvements on the previous version:

Support for https (including self-signed certs)
Connection issue fixes for self-hosted WordPress sites
Fix for local drafts not showing if the user had no posts/pages
UI tweaks including a new loading bar in the tab view
Better support for WordPress MU blogs
Automatic detection of xmlrpc.php w/ fallback to manual prompt

You’ll find the QR code for the application in this post. Just point your phone barcode scanner at the application and your Android phone will download it for you.

Optimise your WordPress Performance

Posted on February 19, 2010 by Owen

photo credit: jefferyalbergo & the neon cat

I came across a great article that talks about some performance improvements that one can put into place on a WordPress blog. The headline things to look at are:

Enable WordPress caching
Use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache
Minimise the number of high performance plugins
Turn on MySQL caching
Tweak your PHP settings

Just keep in mind that you don’t need to be looking at these things until you’re receiving hundreds of thousands of hits a day. But it’s good to know in case you notice performance issues on your blog. You don’t need slimming pills to make your blog lean and mean. Just implementing a few tweaks can make a world of a difference. Read the complete article here

WordPress 2.9.2

Posted on February 15, 2010 by Owen

There’s a new drop of WordPress which fixes a small bug some of you may have been exposed to. Here are the details of the fix:

Thomas Mackenzie alerted us to a problem where logged in users can peek at trashed posts belonging to other authors. If you have untrusted users signed up on your blog and sensitive posts in the trash, you should upgrade to 2.9.2.

You can upload directly from your blog if you have a recent version. It doesn’t matter if you have a blog about jokes, or one that reviews all types of acne lotion, it’s always worth being on the latest version of WordPress, just to avoid any issues.

The WordPress Foundation

Posted on January 23, 2010 by Owen

It’s great to see that the WordPress team has set up the WordPress Foundation with the express aim:

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.

It’s a sure sign that the platform is maturing and it’s nice to see that care is being taken to protect the brand and the software. It doesn’t matter if you’re building healthcare job search engine, or a joke shop; the platform you run on is paramount to the longevity of your business.

Some new WordPress sites

Posted on January 16, 2010 by Owen

With WordPress 2.9 downloaded almost 2.5 million times so far, you can easily imagine how many new WordPress sites get deployed every day. That number is probably just a subset of the number of WordPress sites out there, after all, many don’t get refreshed every time a new version of WordPress comes out. Just this week, I’ve pushed out SherrilynneStarkie.com and am working on jcc.im. I know that a friend of mine is working on the All Saints, Hove site too, and that’s just today.

I think part of the attraction is the fact that it’s so easy to do build something. Putting a site together is quite easy and I actually quite enjoy popping into a coffee shop, relaxing in one of their modern sofas, getting an Internet connection and tweaking one of my sites.

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