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:

1. Thrash It
2. Image Editor
3. Batch Plugin Update
4. Easier Video Embeds
5. Database Optimization Support

What is your favorite new feature in WordPress 2.9?

Back when WordPress 2.7 was released, the WordPress team introduced a completely revamped comment form that included integration of threaded comments into the core software, introducing some dramatic changes with how comments are handled.   Unfortunately, this change broke one of the most popular comment hacks, separating trackbacks from comments.

Since then, several people have stepped up and shared some great hacks for separating trackbacks from comment in WordPress 2.7 or newer blogs .  So far the best guide I’ve found came from Sivel.net, which can be viewed here.  Click over and follow those steps get everything separated.

Note: The above guide is only for people using WordPress 2.7 or newer installations.  For people using WordPress 2.6 or earlier, you’ll want to use this tutorial.

Once you’ve got the comments successfully separated from the trackbacks, there are a couple additional tweaks you may want to do to clean up how things look (it really depends on preference I suppose).   The first is to clean up your trackbacks/pingbacks by only displaying the title instead of an excerpt and everything else.   In order to do this, you’ll need to find the following code in your comments.php file:

<ol>
<?php wp_list_comments('type=pings'); ?>


Now replace that code with the following:

<ol>
<?php wp_list_comments('type=pings&callback=list_pings'); ?>


Lastly, you’ll need to add the following code to your functions.php file (which can be created if you don’t already have one):

<?php
function list_pings($comment, $args, $depth) {
$GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment;
?>
<li id="comment-<?php comment_ID(); ?>"><?php comment_author_link(); ?>
<?php } ?>


That should clean up the trackbacks/pingbacks section and you can also apply the same changes if you use a plugin to display tweetbacks.

The other thing you may want to do is fix the comment count to only show actual comments, filtering out the trackbacks/pingbacks which are included in your comment count by default.   Simply add the following code to your functions.php file (which again can be created if you don’t already have one):

<?php
add_filter('get_comments_number', 'comment_count', 0);
function comment_count( $count ) {
if ( ! is_admin() ) {
global $id;
$comments_by_type = &separate_comments(get_comments('status=approve&post_id=' . $id));
return count($comments_by_type['comment']);
} else {
return $count;
}
}
?>


So there you go.  Anyone have any other tips for cleaning up your comment form?

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. 

Since missing out on the WordCamp Chicago event that took place a few months ago, I’ve been keeping an eye on upcoming WordCamp events in the hopes that one will happen here in the Midwest again.

If you’ve been considering going to one of these events, today I noticed a post from the official WordPress site listing the upcoming WordCamps, which can be viewed here.  For your reference, here are the events they list:

• WordCamp New Zealand: Wellington, New Zealand, August 8-9, 2009
• WordCamp Huntsville: Huntsville, Alabama, USA, August 15–16, 2009
• WordCamp Los Angeles: Los Angeles, California, USA, September 12, 2009
• WordCamp Philippines: Makati City, Philippines, September 19, 2009
• WordCamp Portland: Portland, Oregon, USA, September 19-20, 2009
• WordCamp Seattle: Seattle, Washington, USA, September 26, 2009
• WordCamp Birmingham: Birmingham, Alabama, USA, September 26-27, 2009
• WordCamp Netherlands: Utrecht, Netherlands, October 31, 2009
• WordCamp NYC: New York, New York, USA, November 14-15, 2009
• WordCamp Mexico: Mexico City, Mexico, November 20, 2009

It is good to see so many international WordCamps happening, as well as a few here in the United States.   If you are able to attend one of these events, I think most past WordCamp attendees would definitely recommend it.  I definitely am planning on attending the next one that takes place here in the Midwest.

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?