Continue reading »]]> I’ve just been notified by my WordPress system that 3.0 has now officially arrived.

I’ve just installed the update and from what I can see, there’s no major overhaul. However, there are a few minor adjustments that make a big difference. Updating plugins has become much quicker with the new updates page on the Dashboard. In addition, a few cosmetic changes have made browsing the WordPress Dashboard much more straightforward and intuitive.

If you want to grab the new update, either do an automatic upgrade from your WordPress Dashboard, or head to wordpress.org and download it from there!

Continue reading »]]> WordPress is brilliant, undoubtedly, but there are some things that really drive me insane.

Ever since WordPress 2.8.1 was released, I haven’t been able to use the automatic upgrade feature in WordPress because it simply does not work. This problem has been identified by many other WordPress users, but I know that not everyone has the problem.

Here’s what I mean – every time I try to upgrade WordPress the following problem arises:

It is as simple as that. No error messages, no PHP warnings, just “Installation Failed”.

I’ve been searching everywhere for a fix but I can’t find one anywhere. It’s beginning to really annoy me now. I’ve just ignored it for a while and upgraded WordPress manually – but it really drives me mad having to take down GEEK! and then put it back up.

Has anyone found a fix for this problem?

Update 13.9.09: A big thanks to “lujcas”, who has posted a comment with a fix to this problem. I’ve tested it and it seemed to work for me. To make it easier for everyone, I’ve uploaded the file he added to the GEEK! download server, so you can download a copy here. You just need to unzip the file and place it in the wp-includes directory on your WordPress install and overwrite any previous file.

Continue reading »]]> Back in February I did a top 5 WordPress plugins. Now, I think it is probably time I updated it a little, so I’m going to do another top 5 plugins. I use these plugins quite actively on GEEK! so I feel the creators of these plugins deserve a little thanks from me.

So, here are my top 5 WordPress plugins for April – July 2009:

1. Executable PHP Widget: Sometimes it can be really annoying that sidebars in WordPress don’t support PHP code. Maybe you want to have a login/logout link to your blog in the sidebar. Sadly, the standard “Text” widget in WordPress only supports text and HTML, but not PHP. This plugin sorts that problem for you. Activate the plugin and then select the “PHP code” widget from the “Widgets” section of the WordPress dashboard. The new widget will accept text and HTML, as well as PHP, so it can be really helpful.
2. Clean Archives Reloaded (external): This plugin lets you create an archive page for your posts really easily. It does all the work for you. You simply install the plugin and it does the rest. Simply create a page that you want to have the archive on, insert the code for the plugin, and the job is done.
3. Full Comments on Dashboard (external): Find it annoying when WordPress doesn’t show full comments on the WordPress dashboard? I do, so I installed this plugin, and the problem was solved. There’s no configuration for this plugin – you just install it, activate it, and it starts working straight away.
4. Lock Out: Need to do maintenance to your WordPress website or blog? This is a really simple plugin that locks all users out of your website, except yourself of course. You can set a customized message to let your viewers know that the site is offline for maintenance. It’s a very handy little plugin. Oh, a word of warning – the WordPress plugin site claims it only works to WordPress 2.5. However, I’m on WordPress 2.8.2 (at the time of writing) and the plugin works absolutely fine.
5. Google XML Sitemaps (external): This is a great plugin that handles all of your sitemaps for you. It creates your sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz file for you. It then hands over all the information to search engines such as Google, Ask Search and MSN Search (or Bing – whatever they call it now!).

Those are my top 5 plugins for now. I’ve used all of them for several weeks (some for months) and they’ve all been really helpful and easy to use.

I’ll do another top 5 in a couple of months, but for now – the above are my favourites! Enjoy.

Continue reading »]]> The WordPress team have recently finished the latest addition to the WordPress family.

WordPress 2.8 includes a huge range of new and useful features. Here are just a few that can be really handy:

• You can choose how many columns you’d like on the dashboard, which is very handy if you have a larger monitor.
• You now have either 1 or 2 columns on the New Post/Edit Posts page.
• There is now a theme browser and theme auto installer.
• The Widgets page has been revamped, with handy new additions such as Inactive Widgets for future use.
• There is now syntax highlighting on code pages, such as the Edit Plugins pages.

That’s just some of the new features, but it is definitely worth the update.

If you already have WordPress 2.7 or higher installed, you should have been notified on the Dashboard and you will be able to auto upgrade. If you are using a version below 2.7 or you want to upgrade manually, you can download the update from http://wordpress.org/download/.

Enjoy!

Continue reading »]]> In case you aren’t already aware, WordPress have been doing some work on the upcoming release of WordPress 2.8.

They’ve just served up beta 2 of WordPress 2.8, so if you’d like to try it, have a look here.

If you didn’t see GEEK!’s review of WordPress 2.8 Beta 1, you can check it out here.

That’s all for now. I’ll write up a review if it looks worth it. I haven’t actually investigated beta 2 yet, so it may just be bugfixes. Enjoy!

Continue reading »]]> WordPress recently released WordPress 2.8 Beta, which has some interesting new features which will come in handy.

As usual I’ve tested it out, and here are the highlights:

New theme installer

This new theme installer now means that WordPress can install themes you find on the WordPress Theme Directory straight to your theme directory without the need of FTP or manual file copying. It’s very similar to the automatic plugin installation system that was implemented in WordPress 2.7. However, it is more advanced and allows the user to select certain filters to make searching easier. This will definitely be a nifty little feature to look forward to.

Widget handling

The widget handling system has been improved, with a much better click and drag interface which is much simpler to use than the previous widget handling system.

Those are the two things I find most useful. Other than that, I can’t find anything else that I would find outstanding.

WordPress has posted a Codex page with information that corresponds to the WordPress 2.8 Beta, so if you’d like a full changelog please click here.

Try it out and see what you think. I haven’t found any major bugs, but I’d recommend you don’t install it on your main blog/site. If you can, create a test blog for WordPress 2.8 beta and wait for the final release before installing it on your main blog/site.

Continue reading »]]> Since, over the last few months, I have become a massive fan of the well-known blogging platform WordPress, it begs the question could you run a normal website using WordPress?

Well, I am quite confident in saying yes. I am now designing and setting up websites for a small range of people, and with all of them I’ve set them up using WordPress.

WordPress was originally designed as a platform for blogging. It is used by millions at wordpress.com, and you can also run it on your own site by installing the package at wordpress.org.

I love using WordPress with GEEK!. I have used it even since it was launched back in September 2008. It’s a great platform that not only blogs well, but has really neat features and great expansion capabilities.

And I believe that WordPress can be used for websites and not just blogs. Frankly, it beats many web design software packages available, both free and paid. The community that has accumulated with WordPress is also unbelievable. People are now producing fantastic plugins and themes that can be used for free on any site. Even the theme that I use on GEEK! is used with thanks to the people at jide.fr who produced the fantastic ‘Freshy 2′ theme.

So, if you are thinking of building a website any time soon, take a look at WordPress. It is quite obviously designed for blogs, but if you’ve got the time to play around with it a bit, you can get a perfectly good website going in a few hours. In my opinion, it’s better than any freeware or commercial product around.

Continue reading »]]> Good old WordPress 2.7.1 was released yesterday by WordPress. There isn’t really very much to it – just a few bug fixes really.

In any case, you should definately upgrade to it. If you’ve got WordPress 2.7 already, you can just use the automatic upgrade feature. If you’d prefer not to, just do the usual thing of overwriting files on your current install from the download on the WordPress website.

Continue reading »]]> Well, you’ll probably know GEEK! (and most of the other sites I run) strongly rely on WordPress. It’s a fantastic platform, not only for blogging. It’s extremely customizable and you can just spend hours messing around with all the config with it. It’s also extremely reliable and as long as your server is up, it is there open to the web. And if you’ve got WordPress installed with cPanel on your server, running your website is a dream. Perhaps sometime I’ll do a post on cPanel.

Anyway, I also use quite a few plugins with GEEK!. Some of them are vital to me, and some of them I just use to add a bit of feel to the site. So, I thought I would do a top 5 to show my favourite and most loved plugins for WordPress. Remember, all plugins are free and a lot of them are open source so don’t restrain yourself. However try not to have too many as it will hog up resources on your server and your webhost may not be too happy about this. I would definitely say don’t use more than 15 simultaneously.

Here are your top 5:

1. Statpress: A fantastic stats system for any blog or site hosted with WordPress. It monitors all the traffic coming into your site, and manages it into individual visitors, pageviews, spiders (bots) and feeds. You can look at detailed statistics on what browser, OS, country and versions each IP that visited your site was using. You can monitor specific IPs and search for specific results. The only thing I don’t like is that you can’t get it to ignore your own IP (as far as I know anyway) so that might be an issue for some users. Try it anyway, it uses little resources and doesn’t use Javascript so won’t miss anyone not using Javascript.
2. Sidebar Login: I like this plugin because it means any user can log onto their account with your site by just using the sidebar of your site. Saves having to go to the wp-login page. I mainly have it because I’m lazy, but also because it is very useful. I prefer it to the meta widget WordPress provides.
3. All in One SEO Pack: A great plugin if you want to get your site out on the web search sites (which… most people do). Will sort out your META title, description and tags for you. Just type in what you want and it will make sure its on search engines like Google and Yahoo.
4. Genki Announcement: A simple but useful plugin which allows you to post announcements on your site. It proves quite useful if you need to alert users of scheduled downtimes or other simular warnings. It’s not compatitable with all themes, but most work so you should be OK.
5. Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam (external): A great system for comment SPAM reduction. Will add a CAPTCHA to your website’s comments form so that real users will be seperated from computer spam. You can also set it so registered users that are logged in do not have to fill the CAPTCHA in. If you’re getting lots of spam, this is the plugin for you.

So there you have it – my favourite WordPress plugins. They are all compatitable with WordPress 2.7 (I’ve tested them) so you should be fine. See what you think. If you’ve got any other great plugins you’d like to recommend, throw in a comment!

Continue reading »]]> At last! It’s here and I’ve just got it running on the GEEK! site. Despite a few issues I had with the wp-includes folder, its now working. Oh, and that would explain the small downtime earlier, my apologies

Anyhow, you’ll be really pleased to know I really like it! They’ve finally put all the features back and I can use the click and drag again. The new dashboard is fantastic, and overall the interface is a massive improvement.

Definately, without fail, download the new version at www.wordpress.org!

Thanks everyone at WordPress!