13 steps

So the official WordPress Theme Directory is finally reopened. Yay.
Now it would be nice if the demo / live preview blog showcased all the features that WordPress offers so we can actually see whether the themes support it.
I want to see subpages (and hell, more than 2 pages), I want to see gallery posts, posts with images left, center and right aligned. I want to see comments, gravatars, block quotes, code blocks, everything!

Woohoo, it hath arrived! I’m very much looking forward to installing it tonight and giving it a go. The new features look very interesting, I’m curious how much use I’ll have for versioning but it’s good that it’s there either way for when building more CMS-like web apps. The new ‘Press this’ also makes it a lot easier to post about something you’re reading on the web.

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According to this post everyone HAS to keep updating WordPress to the latest version, because otherwise you risk getting hacked. Which is sound advice, but… on the other hand, why? I did upgrade to 2.5 and I think it’s a big step in the wrong direction. I don’t like the admin panel, with a new dashboard where you can’t add or remove anything without adding a plugin for that because they seem to have forgotten to implement it. With an advanced media manager whose advanced options I don’t like. Oh, and you can now select if you want to left or right align a picture. For which it adds some css. Which doesn’t work here. Which is why I can still add my own align=”left”. Or with a new widget interface, which was once meant as a simple system so newbies could drag and drop and tweak their look without having to know any code. Except the drag and drop is now gone. And so is the feature that you could remove a widget and it would still remember its settings so if you dragged a text widget from one bar to another the text would still be there. And gone is gzip as an option because according to ‘them’ we don’t need it.
And so on and so forth. So I don’t like this ‘you HAVE to update or risk death’ because I don’t want to HAVE to upgrade and lose features and ease of use. Everywhere you can read about people who hate 2.5 and rolled back to 2.3.3. Which is good for now, but undoubtedly soon there are going to be exploits discovered for it, which can only be ‘fixed’ by upgrading.
I’m posting this in 2.5 so I can’t roll back without at least losing this and a few recent posts. I’m still contemplating it. If someone decides to fork 2.3.3 I might.

Well, it’s been out for a few days but judging by this FAQ and the comments there I’m considering waiting with an upgrade until 2.5.1 sees the light of day. Or maybe upgrade one of my smaller blogs first before I bork this one.

Wordpress 2.5 is coming, and with it comes a new admin backend interface that, according to most, is a step backwards. I’m not quite sure I agree with it and I’m glad it at least gets an overhaul. As for the aesthetics, Fluency Admin is a plugin I’m going to install to take care of that, because I think it looks really slick.

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WordPress widget heaven, this theme widgetizes everything, including the content.
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I have been using the MyDashboard plugin for a while, it replaces the default WordPress Dashboard for something slicker and more expandable, with ‘gadgets’, small widgets you can drag and drop and drag around to make the dash look just the way you want it.
Now I came across this today, 4 must have gadgets for MyDashboard. I especially love the activity gadget and the draft gadget which shows your draft posts right in the dash, no idea why they aren’t there to begin with.

The one problem with WordPress MU is that even though it’s billed as the stuff that drives wordpress.com that’s a bit of a stretch. Think more of it as the engine. But an engine alone doesn’t make a car. And so the MU users are left to scratch their chin and come up with their own solutions. Which is cool for those who are pros and/or run MU for commercial sites, but it has left us hobbyists a bit in the dark.
Enter BuddyPress.

BuddyPress will completely transform a vanilla installation of Wordpress MU into a fully functional social network platform.

Yippee-kah-yeah motherfuckers. Very awesome news. Check his site for how things came to be, a big yay for Andy.

Wow, 19 people are subscribed to my RSS feed. I’m flattered. *sniffs* Seriously.
And how do I know this? Well, thanks to the lovely Feed Statistics plugin. The great thing about this is that it’s the first plugin I know of that gives you insight to how many people dig your feeds without having to sign up to Feed Burner.

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