Are you a visual learner (a person who learn better through viewing rather than reading)?   One of the challenges when writing WordPress hacks is trying to take something you know how to do and explain it in a way that others will understand.  A well explained hack will allow just about anyone to successfully implement the hack on their own WordPress blogs.

For visual learners, this can sometimes be difficult.   For these people, a better solution is typically to watch one of the many WordPress video tutorials you can find scattered throughout the internet.   We’ve posted a few here before, but I wanted to draw your attention to a recent post over at Six Revisions where they’ve covered 30+ WordPress video tutorials. You’ll find a bunch of the better WordPress video tutorials from around the internet, all in one convenient location!

Have you been around since the early days of WordPress?   For those that have, I think you’ll really enjoy a recent post over at Planet Ozh which covers A Journey Through Five Years of WordPress.   For those that are new to WordPress, you may also enjoy Ozh’s post, as it shows just how far WordPress has come over the past 5 years!

Of course, back in 2003, blogging was still in its very early stages as well, so probably the thing I most enjoyed about this post is seeing how well WordPress has grown along with blogging.

Out of curiosity, I thought it might be fun today to see when everyone else started using WordPress.  My first WordPress installation was the start of the WordPress 2.0.x branch.   I used Blogger briefly, tried Typepad, but fell in love with WordPress quickly and the rest is history.

How about you?  What was the first version of WordPress you used?

Disclaimer: This post was written to generate some discussion about this topic.  If you have an idea for something you’d like to see added or integrated into WordPress, you can always contribute ideas and vote on other ideas over at WordPress Ideas.    If you look through the most popular ideas (historically), you’ll see that many are eventually integrated into the core WordPress software.  Some past examples are the current tagging system, automatic plugin updates, etc.    In other words, WordPress users often dictate which features are integrated into WordPress!

Over the next couple weeks, I plan on writing a few posts and get a couple discussions going about potential features I’d like to see built into the core WordPress installation.   We’ve talked about this in general a little bit before and many of these features are already available as WordPress plugins, but I feel they are important enough to bloggers that they should be built directly into WordPress.    Doing this also helps minimize the number of plugins used by WordPress.org bloggers, which can in turn minimize security risks or huge drains on system resources which can come from plugins.

This week I’ve decided to talk about the current WordPress search feature.  In its current state, the WordPress search feature is very basic.   You type in your keyword(s) and it will display all posts which contain that keyword in the reverse order of how they were posted (newest posts first).   This obviously does not make it easy for a reader of your blog to find the more relevant posts without a little luck.  The post they are looking for might be 3 pages deep!

As a result, many WordPress users have turned to building a Google Custom Search Engine (GCSE) into their WordPress blog.   This allows Google AdSense ads (it is optional), but much more importantly, it uses Google’s algorithm to display the most relevant posts first, allowing readers to find what they are looking for!

In a future version of WordPress, I’d like to see some attention put into building an improved search feature within WordPress.   Having an improved search algorithm would also be beneficial when searching within the WordPress dashboard as that search works the same way.  When trying to find a post to edit, I sometimes have to flip through several pages looking for it (if it is an older post).

What do you think?  Would you like to see improved search within WordPress?   How high of a priority is it to you?

If you are a visual person that prefers to learn through watching rather than reading, there are a huge number of great WordPress tutorials all over the internet which you can use to learn a variety of WordPress-related things, ranging from very basic stuff to some more advanced tutorials.

A copule of months ago I shared with you some nice WordPress video tutorials from YouTube, which seemed to get a pretty good responase.   Because there seems to be an interest, I wanted to pass this along to our readers.

It looks like more recently, Speckyboy went a step further and published 100+ WordPress video tutorials from a large variety of sources, including the popular iThemes tutorials.   If you are a visual person, I recommend you check this post out in all its glory!

One of the most anticipated new features with WordPress 2.7 is the new core update feature which will automatically update your WordPress installation, removing the tedious process of installing the software yourself or waiting for Fantastico to update with the latest version of WordPress. 

However, this new feature is not necessarily compatible with every web host, so it looks like the WordPress community has created a very nice list of Web Hosts that the Core Update Feature is Compatible With.   It probably won’t affect whether you upgrade or not, but you can check this list to confirm your web host is included.