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:

1. Make a backup of all your site data
2. Upgrade of all your plugins
3. Visit plugin and theme author websites
4. Disable all plugins
5. 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!

Twitter has exploded in popularity over the past year as many mainstream media sources have been using the service to communicate with their readers/viewers, but did you know that bloggers can now use Twitter to promote their content as well?

While searching for a WordPress plugin that could automatically publish my blog posts on Twitter, I was thrilled to discover the WordTwit WordPress plugin.    With this plugin, simply upload and activate, then enter the Twitter login information for the account you want the tweets to appear under.   Once done, all your WordPress posts will start to appear on your Twitter account (almost instantly from my experience).

[Download the WordTwit WordPress Plugin]

When setting up a WordPress blog that allows for multiple authors, it seems many people think all that is involved is to setup additional author profiles and/or start accepting guest posts.   Unfortunately, it really isn’t that simple if you want to create a high quality WordPress blog.

Setting up a multi-author WordPress blog may require you to use a number of WordPress plugins to support a variety of functions.   Ideally you’ll also want your theme to be hacked to help maximize the exposure your authors get.   Examples include creating a “Write for Us” page, creating author profile pages, setting your theme to display the author’s profile below their posts, etc.

Multiple Author WordPress Plugins

Here are a couple WordPress plugins that we’ve covered in the past that are ideal for multi-author WordPress blogs:

• Author Exposed – Adds a full featured display of the authors profile.
• Role Manager Plugin – Allows you to control what the various WordPress user roles can and cannot do.

And here are a few other WordPress plugins that you may also have an interest in (we use a few of these here at WordPress Hacks):

• Author Advertising – Plugin that allows you to share Google AdSense income or other advertising between multiple authors.
• Blog Metrics – Collects blog metrics based upon the author of the posts.
• List Authors Widget – Displays a list of authors in your widgets panel linking to the authors.php page.
• Multiple Authors – Allows multiple authors to be listed for an individual WordPress post, automatically keeping track of who has edited the entry.

Multiple Author WordPress Hacks

Here are a few WordPress Hacks we’ve published in the past to help you hack your WordPress theme to be more multi-author friendly:

• How to Add an Author Page to Your Theme
• How to Change the Author Archives Permalink
• How to Single Out Author Comments
• How to Link Author’s Gravatars to Their Posts
• How to Add Bio Information to Your Posts
• How to Point Author Links to the Authors Website
• How to Create a Maximum Size for Your Images
• How to Use Multiple Stylesheets

I’m sure there are also some WordPress plugins or WordPress hacks which aren’t listed above.   Have any multiple author tools or resources you’d like to add to this list?  Let us know in the comments so we can update our post!

If your WordPress blog has been around for awhile, chances are there is some clutter in your MySQL database.   For these situations, Joost De Valk of Yoast.com has an easy to use WordPress plugin called Optimize Database.

This free WordPress plugin simply needs activated, then whenever you click Optimize Now, the plugin runs an optimize table command on your WordPress tables, effectively defragmenting it. This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated. If you’d like to learn more about why this WordPress plugin might be necessary, you can read more information on this post.

Great plugin Joost!

[Download the Optimize Database Plugin]

About a year and a half ago we wrote about how to backup your WordPress blog.   In that post, we covered a few different WordPress plugins to manage your database backups, and explained why that was so important.  

For the record, the plugin I primarily recommended back then and still prefer today is the WP-DB Manager plugin.  This plugin allows you to backup and restore databases, as well as delete database tables, giving users full control over their database backups.

Unfortunately, that plugin only creates a backup for your database.   What about everything else?   WordPress blogs have a theme (or multiple themes), many use several WordPress plugins, and most bloggers use images that you’ve created to help draw attention to your posts or to illustrate a point.

Blog Exchange Traffic decided to fix this with their WordPress plugin release, the WordPress Backup plugin.   This plugin backups up your themes, plugins, images, and gives you the option to download these backups or have them emailed to you (this only works if it is a smaller sized backup).   WordPress Backup also works along side the WP-DB Manager plugin mentioned above, so it is recommended that you use both.

What do you use to manage your WordPress backups?