I caught a video of some of the new features in Wordpress 2.7 a few weeks back and since then I’ve been eagerly awaiting its official release (no beta man me!). So it arrived yesterday and I finally got to play with it.

First off, I used Wordpress Automatic Upgrade as always to upgrade to 2.7 and it done the job ok. Only ok I say because it never turned back on my plugins but maybe this was a blessing in disguise as I then decided to turn them all on one by one to see if anything cocked up. Out of all my lengthy list of plugins, all re-activated and only 2 had problems when I tried to actually use them again – ‘Share This Newsletter’ and ‘Loudervoice’. After some minor tinkering with Share This I got it working again but I await word on Loudervoice.

I also found that 1 or 2 plugins could be discarded as their functions are now covered in WP 2.7, ie – ‘Ozh Admin Dropdown menus’ because the new menu system is sleek and ‘Wordpress Automatic Upgrade’ itself as WP 2.7 now has automatic upgrade built in. Yay!

My Wordpress theme, K2 is sometimes a problem on these upgrades but everything seems fine there too and the main front end of the blog looks exactly the same so happy days!

Here’s some of my favorite features of the new admin:

• Love the minimalist feel and design and like the new icons.
• The new admin plugin installer lets you upload plugins directly from your pc which will make it easier for my clients to add their own plugins in future instead of me doing it or telling them to use ftp. You can also install external featured and popular plugins with a couple of clicks directly from admin.
• You can customize the layout and tidy up most screens, eg – Dashboard, Edit Posts, etc.. handy for the OCD’s amongst us!
• The new menu system is great and if you compress it it acts like a drop down/fly-out!
• That afore mentioned built in automatic upgrade should be cool, hope it works as well as my previous plugin though.
• Like the ‘QuickPress’ function on the dashboard through which I’m writing this post!
• Love the Quick Edit’ function on the Edit Pages, Posts and Comments screens.
• Liking the Bulk editing functions also.
• The word count at the bottom of the description editor is handy!

Here’s some of my least favorite features:

• The text at the bottom of the admin – “Thank you for creating with Wordpress, etc…” is in italics and looks shit like all italics on the web!
• Em, can’t think of anything else at the min….

All in all this new Wordpress 2.7 seems to be built more efficiently both in terms of performance and time saving functions as well as giving you the opportunity to reduce clutter and generally speed up your blogging. It was worth the wait and excitement.

Leon.

About this time last year I set about looking for some way of easily giving my web design clients what they craved – a simple, quick and cheap way of maintaining their own websites without resorting to buying expensive software, learning web design or paying me a fortune to maintain the site for them, something I’d rather not do anyway!

So having established that there was no easy way of adding content managment to an existing site, I googled “free cms software” and got introduced to the main players in the market, , namely: Joomla, Drupal, Simple CMS & Wordpress.

The funny thing now as I look back was that even though Wordpress appeared in my google search I didn’t cop that this was what it turned out to be, a free, downloadable piece of script that you could install at your domain name/website and use as a website builder/cms. Rather, I associated it with the hosted version at www.wordpress.com which I had been using and was impressed with for a few months previous.

After messing about with Joomla & Drupal and finding them way too complex and over the top for mine and my clients needs and after finding Simple CMS a little too simple, I continued my search, starting to feel a little disappointed. The SECOND I realized that there were 2 versions of Wordpress, one of which I could use independantly of wordpress.com, I knew my atheist prayers were answered!

Heres a quick Feature list for this fantastic piece of web software, king of CMS and Blogging tools:

• Add, Edit and Remove a limitless number of Pages & Blog Posts,
• Install themes/templates in a matter of minutes, completely changing the look and feel of your site/blog,
• Use purely as a website management tool and ignoring the Blog part,
• Add external links easily,
• Add link and blog categories,
• Plugin integration to add almost any website functionality you can think of,
• Automatic communication tools to communicate with other blogs,
• Search Engine friendly – (Google loves Wordpress!!),
• Spam protection built in,
• User Registration and multiple Authors/Editors,
• Import Blogs from other popular blogging sites/platforms,
• Text Formatting,
• Add images, files, audio, video, etc..,
• Add links,
• Drag and drop widget/module layout control,
• Ability to let users leave comments,
• And a lot more..!

Try it – www.wordpress.org (not.com!)

Leon.