WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.As a little bonus, 2.3.2 allows you to define a custom DB error page. Place your custom template at wp-content/db-error.php. If WP has a problem connecting to your database, this page will displayed rather than the default error message.For more detail on what’s new in 2.3.2, view the list of fixed bugs and see the changes between 2.3.1 and 2.3.2.Special thanks to Alex Concha for his help on this release.

Here’s the full report via MakeUseOf:

BitNami makes it easier to download and install Open Source software packages (i.e. Wordpress, SugarCRM, Drupal, phpBB…) by bundling each package into preconfigured 1-click setup file. No need to deal with configuration settings or dependencies. Just download a package you need, run installation wizard, and that’s it. Once done, you will have a fully-functional and configured copy on your system.

“The BitNami Project was created to help spread the adoption of freely available, high quality Open Source web applications.”

• Advanced search: browse and search open source packages by category (Blogging, CMS, Collaboration, CRM, Wiki, Photo Sharing, etc.), technology (ASP.NET, Java, MySQL, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc.), license type (Apache, Creative commeons, EPL, GPL, …) or tags.
• Recommend and vote on the next to be stacked apps on Bitnami polls.
• BitNami forums: Get help and provide feedback on the BitNami stacks.

Check out BitNami @ www.bitnami.org

BitNami : Open Source Packages. Simplified.

I think an upgrade for me is in the near future:

WordPress 2.3.1 is now available. 2.3.1 is a bug-fix and security release for the 2.3 series.

2.3.1 fixes over twenty bugs. Some of the notable fixes are:

• Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
• Fixes for a login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than
  their WordPress Address
• Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
• Link importer fixes

Unfortunately, some security issues were found in 2.3. Janek Vind found an XSS problem that can be exploited if your php setup has register_globals enabled. For this reason, upgrading to 2.3.1 is advised.

The full set of changes between 2.3 and 2.3.1 is available for viewing on trac.

Get 2.3.1 from the download page and enjoy.

WordPress 2.3.1 (via WordPress)

WordPress 2.3.1, the first maintenance release for the 2.3 series, is coming out soon. The first beta is available now. Get it here.

Over twenty bugs are fixed in 2.3.1. Get the full list here. Here are some highlights.

• Tagging support for Windows Live Writer

• A login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than
  their WordPress Address is fixed
• Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
• Link importer fixes

The standard disclaimer for beta software applies. Please report any bugs you find on the bug tracker.

WordPress 2.3.1 Beta 1 (via Boren.nu)

First Lorrelle (on WordPress) released some great posts on changing your theme:

• Creating a Clickable Header in Your WordPress Theme
• WordPress Themes: The Ignored Footer
• Customizing Your WordPress Theme Footer
• Are Tags Working For You?

WordPress Theme Changes and Design:

• Use Conditional Tags to Empower Your Content (Design Adaptations)
• 13 Tags to Delete From your Theme (Pro Blog Design)
• How to make a WordPress Page or Post use a different sidebar (Lancelhoff)
• Integrate Drupal with WordPress (Weblog Tools Collection)

WordPress.com News:

• WordPress.com: Category to Tag Converter (Blogging Pro)

New RECENT WordPress Plugins:

• RSS Lightbox for Wordpress 2.3 – take a RSS from Photobucket album and display a lightbox with their pictures.
• RB Internal Links – Link to internal posts and pages in your blog in a similar to style to wiki. No need to remember full URLs, post ids or slugs. Wysiwyg plugin to help
• Tinfoil Hat – Tinfoil Hat provides extra privacy configuration for your blog.
• WP Easy PHP Calendar Admin – Adds the Easy PHP Calendar events administration and setup administration to the Wordpress admin area.
• Wiki Dashboard – Wiki on the dashboard for multiple autors.
• Netfirms Pretty Permalinks – This plugin brings pretty permalinks functionality to Netfirms users for both PHP 4 and PHP 5.
• LiveSearch – Includes LiveSearch in your blog. Now Widgetized.
• jPic WordPress Widget – jPic is a general purpose WordPress widget which shows a picture supplied by an URL.
• Hide upload – Hide upload section
• Fresh Text  – Add classes to your html tags and the innerHTML is then automatically parsed into images with specified size, font, and color.
• Fresh Page – Fresh Page is for creating customized write panels with file and photo uploads. Includes automatic photo resizing via phpThumb and c2c_get_custom.
• Tags Manager – This plugin helps you to manage your tags
• Slickr Widget – Adds a sidebar widget that shows your recent Flickr photos. Requires a Lightbox plugin to work properly.
• Simple Tags – Simple Tags is the successor of Simple Tagging Plugin and is THE perfect tool to manage perfeclty your WP 2.3 tags
• CryptX – En-/Decrypt mailto-Links to prevent Spam Bots scanning Sorcecode for Emails.
• Cat Quotes – This Plugin is based on the “Hello Dolly” WordPress Plugin , When enabled you will randomly see a Cat Quote , in the upper right of your admin screen.
• WP OldPost – If the post is older than 1 year, an alert will be displayed before the post encouraging visitors to check if there are more recent posts on the subject
• WP-DOPPLR – WP-DOPPLR is a Wordpress plugin that displays your DOPPLR information on your blog.
• Lightbox 2 – Used to overlay images on the current page.
• 4Avatars – This plugin allows you to add MyBlogLog.com or Gravatar.com or Avatars.pl avatars to Wordpress comments.
• AnswerLinks – AnswerLinks is a plugin that will auto-suggest links to definitions on Answers.com for words in your blog posts.
• WP Contact Form III – A simple contactform for WordPress with antispam question
• WP 2.3 statistics – WordPress 2.3 statistics Plugin will add the statistics into your blog, such as total posts, pages, tags.
• Favourite Post plugin – This plugin is a replica to ‘noteworthy’ plugin.
• EHT Downloads – This plugin generates automatically downloads lists, just giving a path and URL the plugin will generate all the HTML code itself.
• Daniel’s DropDowns – This plugin extends the category and archive lists by providing a dropdown (select) box with a button or link to activate the selection.
• Bookkeeping – A personal financial bookkeeping system.
• Ajax Post Save – This plugin enables you to save any WordPress post/page with Ajax.
• Berri Youtube Gallery – This Widget will display the YouTube videos that you want and the only data needed are the video URLs. There is no need to get YouTube API.
• Berri Personalized Care – This plugin for WordPress will give up to four personalized messages depending on the origin of the visitors of your blog.

Recently Updated Popular (500 or more downloads) Plugins:

• Live Search Popup – Spotlight ™ like live search with an ajax popup
• Different Posts Per Page – Show different number of posts in home, category, search or archive page.
• WP GuestMap – The plugin is Google Map widget builder, currently three major widgets are supported: Guest Locator, Stats Map and Weather Map
• cforms II – contact form – cforms II is an extremely customizable, flexible & powerful contact form plugin.
• Search Everything – Increases Wordpress’ default search functionality through an options panel. Options include searching pages, excerpts, attachments, drafts…
• BackUpWordPress – Manage WordPress Backups. Beta Release. Please help testing and give me feedback under the comments section of the Plugin page.
• All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
• WP 2.3 Related Posts – WordPress 2.3 Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts via WordPress 2.3 tags, and add the related posts to feed.
• ©Feed – Extends the feed at copyright, a digital fingerprint, IP of feed-reader, comments, related posts! Search for content theft and many more features.
• Daiko’s Video Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to display random videos of your own choice from Google, Myspace and YouTube.
• Redirection – Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors.
• HeadSpace2 – A meta-data manager that controls almost every aspect of your site’s meta-data, including full tag/keyword support. Perfect for SEO!
• AJAX Calendar – AJAX Calendar is a plugin that will display an AJAXified WordPress calendar.
• Post Notification – With each new post an email is sent to every registered User in the Database. The email can be text or HTML.
• Contact Form 7 – Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.
• Sideblog Wordpress Plugin – A simple aside plugin.
• Flexible Upload – Resize picture at upload and make thumbnail creation configurable, optionally include a watermark to your uploaded images.
• wp-dTree 3.1 – Turns your sidebar into a very convenient, “dynamic” navigation tree. Supports scriptaculous effects.
• Flexible Upload – Resize picture at upload and make thumbnail creation configurable, optionally include a watermark to your uploaded images.
• DMSGuestbook – DMSGuestbook is an easy configurable guestbook with a lot of features.
• FeedStats – Simple statistictool for feeds.
• Post Avatar – Choose an avatar from a pre-defined list to include in a post.
• Quote Rotator – Creates widget for adding quotes (or other content) on the sidebar. Content will rotate through. Adds section under Manage tab to create and edit…
• New Tag Cloud – A small plugin to add a tag cloud widget
• obsocialbookmarker – Add social book mark icons and links at the bottom of each post: bookmarks options includes del.icio.us, reddit, slashdot it, digg, facebook…
• Subscribe2 – Sends a list of subscribers an email notification when new posts are published to your blog

Also, let’s give a hearty congratulations to Lester Chan (GamerZ) for updating all of his plugins to WordPress 2.3 Compatibility.

Here’s a Long list of New and Updated plugins, as always, don’t forget to check against any of your plugins against the WordPress community 2.3 Plugin Compatibility List before upgrading.. The plugins below “should” all be compatible, but check the community list for a double check.

Noteworthy Plugin:

• Wordpress Upgrade Preflight Check – “Upgrade Preflight Check is a plugin that will attempt to check your other plugins and themes for problems that may cause errors when upgrading to WordPress 2.3. Run this before upgrading and it may save some headaches. It works in version 2.3 too and may be useful to help identify the cause of errors.”

NEW plugins:

• WP-DownloadManager 1.00 – From GamerZ – Adds a simple download manager to your WordPress blog.
• WP-PluginsUsed 1.00 – From GamerZ – Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page
• Archives By Category – Creates a link list of posts sorted by category and ordered by title alphabetically
• aNobii WordPress Widget – aNobii WordPress Widget ia a Wordpress widget which shows randomly the covers of some books from your aNobii’s shelf.
• WP Admin Links – Provides a template tag and a sidebar widget that display a drop-down list with links to admin pages that the user has access to.
• Classy wp_list_pages – Adds a uniqe class or ID attribute to each LI tag generated by wp_list_pages() allowing them to be individually styled with CSS.
• Favicon Manager – Manage the favicon image for your WordPress installation.
• TDO Mini Forms – This plugin allows you to add a form to your website that allows your readers (including non-registered) to submit posts.
• CommentLuv – Appends a titled link to the authors last blog post on their comment giving back some luv to the people that join your discussion.
• Correctly Spell WordPress – Simple plugin to never write again Wordpress, Word Press or whatever. One word, capital W and P, it’s WordPress!
• IP 2 Nation – Guesses your visitor’s Country from his IP
• zLinks – A clickable icon for every post, comment and embedded link leads to additional semantic Web and related data resources.
• Auto Moderate Comments – When a post gets old, instead of simply closing the discussion, send comments and trackbacks to the moderation queue.
• Avatar Popup – Add CSS popups next to mailto links or next to any word. Can be any custom image, and has gravatar support.
• Better Feed – Enhance feed items with anything: ads, copyright, “Add to delicious”, “Read More (400 words)” links…
• Click Counter – How many people click on your links ? Track clicks: link popularity, download counter, etc…
• FAQ Auto Responder – Have a blog where readers often ask the same questions ? Give the Auto Responder a try and save support time!
• Who Sees Ads ? – Manage your ads. Define under what condition they will show (visitor from search engine, old post..). Make more money.
• Sabre – Sabre is an acronym for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine. It’s a set of counter measures against spam registration on your blog.
• WP_Boilerplate – Add “Boiler Plate” text to your post, helping you to avoid having to retype the same instructions etc in different posts.
• Jiglu Auto-tagging widget – Automatically tags and links a Wordpress blog.
• TIL Technorati Incoming Links – This plugin allows you to add again the Technorati Incoming Links to your dashboard (in Wordpress 2.3 or later)
• Tags4page – This plugin allows you to insert tags to pages too and not only to posts

 Recently Updated Popular (500 or more downloads) Plugins:

• cforms II – contact form – cforms II is an extremely customizable, flexible & powerful contact form plugin.
• wordTube – wordTube is your Media Center plugin for WordPress.
• HeadSpace2 – A meta-data manager that controls almost every aspect of your site’s meta-data, including full tag/keyword support. Perfect for SEO!
• All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
• Popularity Contest – Which of your posts/pages are most popular?
• Comment Timeout – Closes comments on blog entries after a user-configurable period of time, with an option to make allowances for active discussions.
• Post Teaser – Post Teaser generates excerpts of posts for the main, archive and category pages, also generate a word count, image count, and estimated reading time.
• AWSOM News Announcement – AWSOM News Announcement allows you to post a news announcement in the area above your posts (or anywhere else you want)
• Google Analytics for WordPress – The Google Analytics for WordPress plugina automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links
• Accessible News Ticker (ANT) – A news ticker/scroller widget that displays posts and RSS with accessible javascript).
• Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam – Stop a lot of spambots from polluting your site by making visitors identify a custom word displayed as an image before commenting.
• Dashboard Editor – With this plugin you can remove sections of the dashboard, add new code, or even add Sidebar Widgets.
• Post Notification – With each new post an email is sent to every registered User in the Database. The email can be text or HTML.
• WP-PostRatings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• WP-Sticky – Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog.
• WP-UserOnline – Enable you to display how many users are online on your Wordpress blog with detailed statistics.
• WP-Stats – Display your WordPress blog statistics. Ranging from general total statistics, some of my plugins statistics and top 10 statistics.
• WP-Print – Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also easily add a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.
• WP-PostViews – Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed.
• WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog.
• WP-EMail – Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend
• WP-DBManager – Manages your Wordpress database
• WP-Ban – Ban users by IP, IP Range, host name and referer url from visiting your WordPress’s blog.
• WPG2 – WPG2 is a Wordpress Plug-in that embeds Gallery2 within Wordpress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into Wordpress.
• TinyMCE Advanced – Enables most of the advanced features of TinyMCE, the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.

K2 Theme Updates:

K2 Release Candidate 2 – “Go grab your copy of RC2. I’m hoping this’ll fix the SBM reordering problems. For now though, please be aware that IE7 might still have problems. And of course, if you’re an IE7 expert and you have some time on your hands, let me know, cuz we could sure use your help.”

Related WordPress Posts:

• 2 Updates for my Blog – WordPress Category and Full Text Feed
• 20+ New and Updated WordPress Plugins – All 2.3 Compatible
• WordPress 2.3 is Here – Posts and Plugins
• WordPress Plugins, Updates and WordPress 2.3 Posts

I have also installed the Full Text Feed Plugin (Wordpress 2.3 Compatible), I figured, in the ever continuing battle of full versus read more feeds, money is not my main goal, blogging is, so why would I make you go through the hassle of going to my web page every time you like a post… If you don’t like the full text feeds, feel free to comment here…

Don’t forget to check against the WordPress community 2.3 Plugin Compatibility List.

Here’s a Long list of New and Updated *ONLY 2.3 Compatible plugins:

NEW plugins:

• Uploaded File Permissions – This plugin changes the file permissions after the upload.
• iPhone / Mobile Admin – Gives a mobile-friendly admin UI to browsers by User Agent. The iPhone is the primary supported device for the first release.
• Cleaner Dashboard – Removes the WordPress news sections and reorganizes the sidebar for maximum screen usage. See the screenshots for more details.
• digg widget – Displays your past 10 dugg stories and make it a widget.
• AutoLink – This plugin takes delimiters and replaces them with links using the GoogleAPI.
• PrivatePost – This plugin is a full featured private post management interface. It allows you to manage all private post’s publishing status via the “Manage” admin
• Anonymous WordPress Plugin Updates – Anonymizes the data transmitted during plugin update checking and notification system.
• CyStats – Statistics plugin including information hits,visits,operating system,browser,dimensions,earchengines and earchwords,pages,time and more
• Remove Parents – Remove Parents is a tiny plugin which remove “category” and parent categories from permalink.
• TSViewerWidget – Show your teamspeakserver as a widget in your wordpress-sidebar.
• Adminbar – This plugin adds an adminbar on the top like in Wordpress.com. Screenshots on my website.

Updated Popular (500 or more downloads) Plugins:

• Social Bookmarking RELOADED – Social Bookmarking RELOADED – Add the social bookmarks services’s icons to your articles in your blogs in order to submit them
• Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam – Stop a lot of spambots from polluting your site by making visitors identify a custom word displayed as an image before commenting.
• cforms II – contact form – cforms II is an extremely customizable, flexible & powerful contact form plugin
• Wordbook – This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Mini-Feed. Your Facebook profile will also show your most recent blog posts.
• BackUpWordPress – Manage WordPress Backups.
• Last.Fm Records – This plugin shows cd covers for cds your listened to, according to last.fm. It can behave as a widget.
• Better Comments Manager – Better Comments manager allows you to view your comments post wise, it also allows you to reply to your comments from within admin panel.
• WP 2.3 Related Posts – WordPress 2.3 Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts via WordPress 2.3 tags, and add the related posts to feed.
• Sideblog Wordpress Plugin – A simple aside plugin.
• Upcoming Events – This plugin can receive iCalendar feeds from third party sites and display aggregated upcoming events from multiple feeds in your sidebar.
• WPG2 – WordPress / Gallery2 Integration – WPG2 is a Wordpress Plug-in that embeds Gallery2 within Wordpress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into Wordpress.
• Front Page Excluded Categories – A basic plugin that *excludes* posts from one or more categories from appearing on the front page.

Previous Plugin Releases and Updates:

• WordPress 2.3 is Here – Posts and Plugins
• WordPress Plugins, Updates and WordPress 2.3 Posts

Technorati Tags: Internet, Technology, Wordpress, Plugins, Updates, News

Facebooked is a WordPress Theme, that I am thoroughly impressed with and it’s relatively acurate design to Facebook. It even has the the little arrows that can minimize the sidebar options.

Here’s a screenshot of the Theme in Action:

Hit up Justin Tadlock » Facebooked: Wordpress Theme

Technorati Tags: Internet, Wordpress, Themes, Facebook

WordPress 2.3 is here. As I said previously, I’m going to wait on the WordPress 2.3 Upgrade. Now that it’s out there are a few confirmed failed upgrades out there. There was little time in between the RC1 and the Final release. The release itself appeared to have come later in the evening on the release date. Thankfully, there have been some massive movements to get everything up to speed. Also, I’m thankful to the GetK2 bunch for updating the K2 Theme to RC1 and WordPress 2.3 ready.

Below are posts, plugins and more all relating to 2.3…

Posts about the Upgrade (Preparation, Information and Updates):

• Preparing for 2.3 (WordPress Development)
• Tags Arrive on WordPress.com Blogs (Lorelle on WordPress)
• Upgrading to WordPress 2.3 Dexter (Weblog Tools Collection)
• WordPress 2.3 Released (GamerZ.WordPress)
• Diary Of An Attempted WordPress 2.3 Update (Footsteps in the Mirror)
• Preparing for WordPress 2.3: Launching Tomorrow (BloggingPro)
• Wordpress 2.3 Launches (BlogSolid)
• Wordpress 2.3 Preparation (Aiming for Independence)
• Wordpress 2.3: Don’t upgrade, INSTANT UPGRADE  (Aiming for Independence)

New Plugins:

• Disable WordPress Plugin Updates – Disables the plugin update checking and notification system.
• Page Category Plus -  Plugin that allows for pages to be assigned categories in the same manner as posts.
• TDO Mini Forms* – This plugin allows you to add a form to your website that allows your readers (including non-registered) to submit posts.
• obsocialbookmarker* – Add social book barker icons and links at the bottom of each post: Digg, del.icio.us, etc.
• Exclude Pages from Navigation* – This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, uncheck this to exclude pages from the page navigation that users see on your site.

*No Mention of WordPress 2.3 Compatibility

 Important Plugins Updated for WordPress 2.3:

• Full Text Feed – Full Text Feed undos this functionality, allowing your feeds to contain the full text regardless of “more’” usage
• Sideblog Wordpress Plugin – A simple aside plugin.
• WP-DB-Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
• GeneralStats – Counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages.
• TimeZoneCalculator – Calculates different times and dates in timezones with respect to daylight saving on basis of utc.
• Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.
• WP-Table – This plugin creates and manages html tables for wordpress.
• Post Notification – With each new post an email is sent to every registered User in the Database. The email can be text or HTML.
• WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) – Create, organize and manage your WordPress menus and navigation lists by logically grouping your pages, categories, users via a drag’n drop interface.
• WPG2 – WordPress / Gallery2 Integration – WPG2 is a Wordpress Plug-in that embeds Gallery2 within Wordpress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into Wordpress.
• wordTube – wordTube is your Media Center plugin for WordPress
• Category Page – Connect pages with one or more Category, and use them as introduction on category archives.
• Advanced Tag Entry 1.02 for WordPress – Plugin for WordPress 2.3 that enhances tag entry on post edit screens.

Plugins Articles:

• How to get Development Version Of My Plugins (All of GamerZ.Wordpress Plugins)
• Thirteen “Lesser Known” Helpful WordPress Plugins (Colloquium)

My Recent Related Posts:

• Preparing for WordPress 2.3 – Must Read
• New WordPress Plugins and Prep for the big Wordpress 2.3 Upgrade – Part 2
• WordPress Plugins, Updates and WordPress 2.3 Posts

Technorati Tags: Internet, Wordpress, 2.3, Upgrade, Plugins, Posts, News

I’m thrilled to announce that Version 2.3 “Dexter” of WordPress is now ready for the world. This release includes native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, and much more. This release is named for the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

The entire team is really proud of this release, and I’m happy that this is our second on-time release under our new development schedule. The grand experiment of a more agile WordPress with significant features in the hands of users more often is working. I could write a blog post about each new feature, but I’ll try to be brief:

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

You’ll notice that two of those features are straight out of the most-voted for ideas list. That’s just the user facing stuff, if you’re a developer you’ll be interested in:

1. Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.
2. We’re using the new jQuery whis is “800% faster.”
3. Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system which, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.
4. The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.
5. Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.
6. The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.
7. Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

You can view the Codex for more information about the release and some screenshots. And of course the place to download is always the same.

WordPress 2.3 (Via Wordpress)

Technorati Tags: Internet, Technology, Wordpress, 2.3, Updates, News

K2 RC1 is WordPress 2.3 ready. Just in time for the big upgrade. So here it is, straight from their mouths:

Alright, this is the one we’ve been swinging for since we started all those years ago. This is the road to 1.0, or K2.0 as it were. This is the first release candidate, and we’re very proud of it.

We’ve been throwing in some serious hours over the last couple of weeks to make sure we were ready for WordPress 2.3, which is on track for release a few days from now, and which, due to fundamental changes, breaks v0.9.6. So if you’re planning on grabbing WordPress 2.3 as soon as it hits the shelves, you’ll want to upgrade to RC1 as soon as possible.

A word of caution however: Because so many things have been upgraded since v0.9.6, a lot of the code hasn’t actually seen as much usage as the v0.9.6 code, and thus you should hold off until RC2 with upgrading if you like your stability over your ‘bling’.

So, what’s new? Well, to be honest there’s just too much to list. The most obvious stuff will be… well, obvious, and the rest should just make everything a little bit better. In other words, you’re better off just take her up for a trial run.

And as usual, please file an issue for any problems you run into, and we’ll look into it as soon as possible. And if you see Steve or Ben around, let them know they did a hell of a job over the last couple of weeks.

PS: For safety purposes, v0.9.6 is still available.

K2 Release Candidate 1 (via GetK2 Blog)

Technorati Tags: Internet, WordPress, Themes, Upgrades, K2

New Plugins:

• FCC Ribbon Manager* – The Ribbon Manager plugin give the ability to add a side ribbon on the blog without touching the template file or the css.
• Last.fm for Wordpress – Last.fm for WordPress displays your recently listened tracks in your WordPress blog.
• Smilies Themer – Smilies Themer allows you to use smilies (emoticons) themes (or packs) to replace the Wordpress default ones.
• UTF8 Sanitize* – This plugin is designed to handle the broken characters that might appear on your blog posts, if their content is converted from/to UTF8 and ISO-8859
• del.icio.us for Wordpress – Del.icio.us for WordPress displays your latest del.icio.us bookmarks in your WordPress blog.
• Stray Quotes – This plugin allows you to embed random quotes into your pages. It comes with a management tool and a option page in the administrative console
• wp-forecast* – wp-forecast is a highly customizable plugin for WordPress, showing weather-data from accuweather.com.

* No Mention of WordPress 2.3 Compatibility

Updated Popular Plugins (only mentioning WordPress 2.3 Compatible here):

• Advanced Tag Entry – The Advanced Tag Entry WordPress plugin extends the built-in tag functionality of WordPress 2.3 and higher, giving you new ways to manage the tags on your post.
• Language Switcher – create a bilingual or multi-lingual blog
• All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines
• Sideblog – Sideblog is a plugin for Wordpress Blog Platform. It is one way of implementing “Asides” – a series of “short” posts, 1-2 sentences in length.

As always, don’t forget to check out the WordPress 2.3 Compatibility list compiled by the community before upgrading!

New WordPress 2.3 Related  Posts (not from me):

• Heads Up News on WordPress 2.3 (Lorrelle on WordPress)

My Recent Related Posts:

• New WordPress Plugins and Prep for the big Wordpress 2.3 Upgrade – Part 2
• Preparing for WordPress 2.3 – Must Read
• WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1 Out – Final Release September 24th
• New Wordpress Plugins and Updates (9-18-07)
• ContentRobot updates WordPress Plugin for iPod Touch Compatibility
• 5 New Wordpress Plugins
• Read these 10 New Posts to Gain Traffic and Street Cred

Technorati Tags: Internet, Technology, Wordpress, 2.3, Upgrade, Plugings, Posts, Education

Upgrading and When:

After reading TechnoSailor’s 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.3, it just confirmed what I’ve haven’t read but only assumed:

WordPress 2.3 brings us a lot of good things. It’s certainly not perfect. I’d personally recommend that everyone wait before rushing right out and upgrading. There may be breakage so make sure you back stuff up. With a new version, it’s usually wise to wait a few weeks and let plgin authors catch up and update their plugins. Of course, the fewer plugins you use, the better off you’ll be – but that’s a matter of choice. Overall, this is a very solid release in my opinion.

Well, TechnoSailor. I’m aboard your recommendation. I’ll wait  at least a week or three since:

• I do use quite a few plugins and wait for some updates
• the new tagging options will have to be implemented in my theme (k2)
• WordPress released the RC1 with less than a week before

That’s that for the WordPress 2.3 (for now).

New Themes:

Wordpress Theme Generator: This latest update comes with 2.3 support and support for Tags as clouds and under each article as article tags. The code generated is now XHTML compliant and there are more colors to choose from. (Thanks Web Log Tools for this)

New Plugins:

One would hope they are 2.3 compatible if they are coming out now, most of them are, if they aren’t, they’ll be noted:

• Advanced Tag Entry WordPress Plugin – lets you choose tags from a drop-down list to your posts, remove tags you’ve already added to your posts, create new tags, edit tags, and delete unused tags from the database.
• Sign Out Reminder – Displays a reminder to users to remember to sign out whenever they log in to the admin area.
• Polaroid on the Fly* – Creates polaroids of images on the fly for thumbnails in posts.
• Plastic Tunes* – A Multi-User “Now Playing” plugin that accepts input from iTunes, WinAmp, and many more.
• Better nearby posts links* – Adds two enhanced commands to replace WordPress ‘previous post’ and ‘next post’ functions.
• WP-PostViews Plus* – Enables You To Display How Many Times A Post Had Been Viewed By User Or Bot.

* = No Mention of 2.3 compatibility

Technorati Tags: Internet, Technology, Wordpress, Plugins, Themes, Updates, News

Apparently the upgrade will be “mandatory” because it will also close security issues, so seems like there’s going to be a lot of confusion ahead. Luckily, I’m compiling here articles and posts that will hopefully enable a smooth transition:

About 2.3:

• All About WordPress 2.3 From WordPress.org
• WordPress 2.3 Features (compiled list by Weblog Tools Collection)
• WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1 Out – Final Release September 24th

Update and Check Your Plugins:

• WordPress 2.3 Compatibility List – compiled and updated with current Beta testers
• Tag Importer for Bunny’s Technorati Tags
• Tagging Plugins for WordPress 2.3 (Via Weblog Tools Collection)

Theme Updates:

• How To Add Wordpress 2.3 Tags To Your Current Theme 
• How To Add Wordpress 2.3 Tags To Your Current Theme, Part 2 (Aiming for Indepenence)

Most Importantly:

• Don’t forget to BACKUP your installation!

And finally Don’t Worry about:

• Automatic URL Redirection for changes in Page and post titles, slugs, and links.

Technorati Tags: Internet, Blogs, Technology, Wordpress, 2.3, Upgrade, News, Posts, Tags, Plugins