WordCamp this weekend

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There are only a few days left before it’s WordCamp time! I’m thrilled to be able to go to WordCamp UK this year. I’ve been wanting to go since I heard about WordCamps, and this one just happened to fit really neatly. It’s in Manchester which means I can boat and train my way there. I may even do some shopping, though I won’t be carrying any wholesale appliances back home. I do want to have a play with an iPad if I find one in the shops, but there are so many things going on, I’m not sure if I’ll find the time for a spot of retail therapy.

So, what’s on the cards? Well, I haven’t had a chance to really study the Running Order, but there are a few sessions that look quite interesting. There are also a number of WordHack sessions which look quite challenging. I’ll keep blogging about it.

NextGen Gallery Plugin

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What plugin do you use to display your photos? One of my favourites is one called NextGEN Gallery Plugin which lets you upload and store photos and even display them on a slide show on your blog. The plugin allows you to upload photos in a variety of ways, my favourite is the ability to upload a ZIP file and let the plugin take care of unpacking and storing the photos.

I’ve used it on a number of different blogs, more recently on the blog for the Isle of Man Choral Society. It’s always allowed me to make great displays on and it’s always made me proud. One I’d recommend to all you WordPress users out there.

100 Million Plugin Downloads

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Have you ever downloaded a WordPress plugin? Well, that’s a bit of a silly question isn’t it; if you’ve ever used WordPress you’ve bound to have downloaded a plugin or two; especially one of the more essential ones like Akismet. Anyway, the WordPress plugin directory has reached a great milestone, exceeding 100 million plugin downloads and counting.

I have a few plugins in the directory myself, nothing as complex as a medical plugin where you can look up all you want to know about human growth hormone; rather there’s WP Auctions, TweetRoll and a bunch of other plugins. Nice to be part of a 100 million target ;)

Going to WordCamp UK

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Yeay! I just managed to sort out a slot so that I can go to Word Camp UK! WordCamp UK is an informal annual gathering of WordPress publishers, designers and developers based in the United Kingdom, held at a different location around the country each year. This year the third WordCamp UK takes place at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School on the weekend of 17-18 July 2010.

I’m pumped that I’m going to manage to make it this year. I wanted to go last year, but it was in Cardiff and I just couldn’t make the travel arrangements work. Manchester is just a boat and a train ride away from here so it will be great! It’s going to be WordPress all the way, no chance to catch a show, buy nuphedragen or do any sort of shopping. It should be awesome!

Can I make it to WordPress UK?

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There’s an outline of some of the WordCamps happening this summer and the one that caught my eye was WordPress UK! Here’s what they say:

July 17–18: WordCamp UK- Manchester, England, UK. The roving WordCamp UK will be in Manchester this year, and is probably the closest to BarCamp style of all the WordCamps, using a wiki to plan some speakers/sessions and organizing the rest ad-hoc on the first day of the event. I’ll be attending this one as well, and am looking forward to seeing WordPress lead developer Peter Westwood again. I’m also looking forward to meeting some core contributors for the first time in person, like Simon Wheatley and John O’Nolan. Mike Little, co-founder of WordPress, is on the organizing team of WordCamp UK. Tickets on sale now!

I’m going to see if there’s anything I can do to fit that in as it would be awesome to make it to a WordCamp finally. Maybe I can buy gold online, sell it again and use the profits to fund a WordCamp trip.. what do you think?

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.