WordPress Hacks » News

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” Now Available

Kyle Eslick — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:28:11 +0000

In what has been a long time coming it looks like WordPress 3.0 is now available for WordPress users to download. Everyone should see a “WordPress 3.0 is available! Please update now” banner in their dashboard which you can click to quickly upgrade, or for those of us that didn’t get the dashboard banner announcing the update being available, you can go into Tools -> Upgrade to complete the update.

WordPress 3.0 is a pretty significant update which includes the WordPressMU integration, 1,217 bug fixes and several important feature enhancements. Here is a video with additional information:

Enjoy writing about WordPress? Get your blog more exposure by joining the WordPress Hacks writing team!

WordPress 2.9 Officially Released

Kyle Eslick — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 01:18:58 +0000

If you’ve visited your WordPress site’s dashboard in the past 24 hours you probably noticed that WordPress 2.9 is now available to download. I know many people like to wait to upgrade to give theme and plugin authors a chance to create updates, but the new changes in WordPress 2.9 seem to be playing nice with everything based upon all the reports I’ve read. I’ve also upgraded most of my websites that use WordPress without any theme or plugin conflicts.

If you are interested in learning about what is new in WordPress 2.9, there is a great write up posted on Quick Online Tips which you can view here. The post features the following new features:

Thrash It
Image Editor
Batch Plugin Update
Easier Video Embeds
Database Optimization Support

What is your favorite new feature in WordPress 2.9?

Enjoy writing about WordPress? Get your blog more exposure by joining the WordPress Hacks writing team!

WordPress 2.8.4 Now Available for Download

Kyle Eslick — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:50:45 +0000

Yesterday there was a ton of discussion via Twitter and on several blogs regarding a comment reset “exploit” which surfaced for the WordPress 2.8.x branch. To avoid recapping the exploit, if you want to learn more about this exploit, check out this great post from our friend Leland of Theme Lab. Along with this exploit came the speculation that WordPress 2.8.4 was soon to follow with a fix.

Well, it turns out these people were correct, as this morning I found a friendly message in my dashboard telling me that WordPress 2.8.4 was ready for me to upgrade! This was especially good news for me, as for some reason people believe that because I run a WordPress fan blog, that they should try it out on this website.

Enjoy writing about WordPress? Get your blog more exposure by joining the WordPress Hacks writing team!

An Early Look at WP.com?

Kyle Eslick — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:30:57 +0000

Back in April 2009, we wrote about Automattic purchasing WP.com. At the time there was a lot of speculation about what the role of this incredible new domain would be. It has now been a few months since they took over possession and it looks like we finally have some hints about what the role of this domain may be.

As of the publishing of this post, it looks like WP.com still redirects to WordPress.com, but if you visit their Get WordPress subdomain, you can see the following splash page promoting their hosted service, as well as a quick comparison to WordPress.org:

It will be interesting to see what they decide to do with the root of the domain. I can’t help but wonder if it would be a good idea to move WordPress.com to a shorter domain like WP.com, giving their bloggers a smaller URL for their hosted blogs. In the age of Twitter it would be nice to have a domain like xxxx.wp.com instead of xxxx.wordpress.com.

What would you like to see WP.com ultimately used for?

Enjoy writing about WordPress? Get your blog more exposure by joining the WordPress Hacks writing team!

Security Update: WordPress 2.8.3 Released

Kyle Eslick — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:51:13 +0000

After the success we’ve had with new branch releases of the past few WordPress branches (2.6 and 2.7 both come to mind), it is a little surprising to see that we already have yet another security patch, this time being WordPress 2.8.3. Because this is a security update, it is highly recommended that everyone take a moment to upgrade their WordPress installation.

Here is what the WordPress team had to say about the WordPress 2.8.3 security update:

Unfortunately, I missed some places when fixing the privilege escalation issues for 2.8.1. Luckily, the entire WordPress community has our backs. Several folks in the community dug deeper and discovered areas that were overlooked. With their help, the remaining issues are fixed in 2.8.3. Since this is a security release, upgrading is highly recommended. Download 2.8.3, or upgrade automatically from your admin.

The ribbon reminder in your dashboard just showed up, so you can now do your automatic upgrade, or manually download WordPress 2.8.3 from here.

Enjoy writing about WordPress? Get your blog more exposure by joining the WordPress Hacks writing team!

WordPress News & Notes – July 24, 2009

Alex Denning — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:51:05 +0000

These days there are so many excellent WordPress blogs and articles, it can be hard to keep up with all the brilliant WordPress articles around, so here are some great articles I’ve saved on my feed reader; feel free to add some posts you’ve found around the web in the comments.

First up, ‘10 Handy WordPress Comments Hacks‘ on Smashing Magazine by Jean-Baptiste Jung of WP Recipes fame.
Next, a post on Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr’s Digging into WordPress caught my eye: ‘Include jQuery in WordPress (the right way)‘. In this post, as you might have guessed, Chris shows how to include jQuery the right way – using the copy of jQuery built into WordPress.
Third, a post on WPWebHost in two parts – ‘Securing your WordPress Install the Foolproof Way’ – parts one and two. A couple of tips in there that you might not have thought of.
Another post that caught my eye was ‘Multiple WordPress Loops Explained‘. I would say more, but it’s pretty self explanatory.
A post that has been around a while, but is worth mentioning anyway – WPCandy presents ’10 Things You Can Do With WordPress Besides Blogging‘. Again, pretty self explanatory, but definately worth a look.
And finally, a little plug for a post I wrote the other day – ‘10 Tips to Improve Your WordPress Theme‘. Check it out. Some rather nice tips in there.

And there we have it. Six links of note! Add your own in the comments.

Enjoy writing about WordPress? Get your blog more exposure by joining the WordPress Hacks writing team!

Security Update: WordPress 2.8.2 Released

Kyle Eslick — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:36:02 +0000

Although it isn’t very long after WordPress 2.8.1 was released, WordPress 2.8.2 was just released today and is a security update which corrects a XSS vulnerability which was discovered. Comment author URLs were not fully sanitized when displayed in the admin. This could be exploited to redirect you away from the admin to another site.

Due to this being a security update, it is strongly recommended that you upgrade your WordPress 2.8 installations as soon as possible. This can quickly and easily be done via your WordPress administrator panel (for WordPress 2.7 and newer installations) via Tools –> Upgrade, or you can manually download it here.

If you’d like to read the official announcement, you can see it here.

Enjoy writing about WordPress? Get your blog more exposure by joining the WordPress Hacks writing team!

How Long Should You Wait to Upgrade WordPress?

Kyle Eslick — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:35:58 +0000

With the recent release of WordPress 2.8 this past week, there has been a number of complications and/or frustrations from the WordPress community, leading to a lot of discussion about how long you should wait to upgrade WordPress when a new branch is released. Historically the WordPress team has always done a great job of testing their releases, which I think lead to a strong confidence from the WordPress community when it was time to upgrade. Combine that with the one-click upgrade option that is now built into WordPress and the annoying tag reminding you to upgrade, and you’ve got a huge number of people who upgraded to WordPress 2.8 immediately upon its release.

Unfortunately, with each new WordPress branch comes changes which sometimes break WordPress plugins, create problems with the WordPress theme you are using, and usually includes changes to the code. If you upgrade before the themes or plugins you rely on have been updated, this can cause problems. The iThemes team recently touched on this subject with their post, When Should I Upgrade WordPress? Their post also includes five helpful things that need done BEFORE you do your one-click upgrade:

Make a backup of all your site data
Upgrade of all your plugins
Visit plugin and theme author websites
Disable all plugins
Ask yourself if you need to upgrade now

I also recommend waiting a week or so to view feedback before upgrading.

I know several of you haven’t upgraded WordPress to 2.8 yet. How long do you plan on waiting until you upgrade your WordPress installation? Please include which version of WordPress you are currently using with your comment!

Enjoy writing about WordPress? Get your blog more exposure by joining the WordPress Hacks writing team!

WordPress 2.8 Officially Released!

Kyle Eslick — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:38:02 +0000

In case you haven’t noticed it yet in your WordPress dashboard, it looks like WordPress 2.8 has officially been released! Don’t forget if you are currently using WordPress 2.7 or 2.7.1, you can use the one-click upgrade feature built into WordPress to upgrade!

The changes from WordPress 2.7 aren’t as noticable as they were from 2.6 to 2.7, but it is always worth upgrading to the latest installation in my opinion. As far as what is new, here is what the WordPress team had to say about the improvements in WordPress 2.8:

Major New Improvements

First and foremost, 2.8 is way faster to use. We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

You can view the entire list of changes here.

Enjoy writing about WordPress? Get your blog more exposure by joining the WordPress Hacks writing team!

WordPress 2.8 Moves to Release Candidate 1

Kyle Eslick — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:47:16 +0000

Going into WordCamp Chicago this weekend, there were a large number of rumors that WordPress 2.8 was VERY close to an official release. Well, the weekend has come and gone and unfortunately we got no official release, but it looks like we have gotten the first release candidate instead.

According to the official WordPress blog, WordPress 2.8 Release Candidate 1 was officially released about an hour ago. Here is their release candidate 1 official announcement:

With Release Candidate 1, we think WordPress 2.8 is ready and complete. Download it, test it, and tell us what you think. If you don’t uncover any bad bugs, 2.8 will be released on Wednesday the 10th.

If you’re interested in what has changed since beta 2, consult the changelog.

You can download Release Candidate 1 here, and consult the changelog from Beta 2 here. If you are wondering what all is new with WordPress 2.8, check out this post by TechnoSailor.

Enjoy writing about WordPress? Get your blog more exposure by joining the WordPress Hacks writing team!