Wordpress 2.8 Upgrade Experience

Wordpress 2.8 offers 790 bug fixes from v2.7 provides  several cool new features. You can now upload new themes using the admin panel, edit plugins from the editor, standardized drog and drag widget activation and placement and many other things that speed up wordpress’s performance.

I chose to manually download and FTP the unzipped files into my hosting account. I pulled up the admin area as soon as the uplaod was finished and was greeted with a “Upgrade Database” button, that I pushed, then was promptly presented with a Success page. It couldn’t have been easier.

I updated a few out of date plugins (Wassup, All in One SEO Pack, Contact Form 7) and took care of a few other housekeeping items while I had my hands dirty.  Share your upgrading experiences by leaving a Reply below.

Wordpress 2.7.1 – My Upgrade Experience

Finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.7.1

The only problem I had was the “Visual / HTML” editor links at the top of the content input box would not let me switch between the two.  After reuploading all files a 2nd time in ASCII everything works fine.  Kudos to the folks at WP for killing most of the bugs here.    If anyone runs into problems trying to upgrade their Wordpress make sure to contact me.

Twitter Tools WordPress Plugin

Hooked on Twitter and WordPress Blogging? Simplify the relationship with the free Twitter Tools Wordpress Plugin from Alex King.

Twitter Tools allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets each time you create a blog post from within WordPress.

1) Once you’ve downloaded and unzipped the Plugin Files, just upload the entire /twitter-tools folder it to your /wp-contents/plugins/ directory.

2) Log into your Wordpress Admin area, navigate to Plugins , then click “Activate” text by “Twitter Tools”. Once activated, you’ll need to perform a few basic configurations. Access the Twitter Tools configuration menu by clicking on “Settings” then selecting “Twitter Tools”. The setup is easy and takes about 45 seconds.

3) To show the last X number of your tweets in your sidebar: Navigate to Appearance -> Widgets -> enable the Twitter Tools Widget. Here you can set a few basic display configurations and choose where to display the widget.

WordPress Plugin Automatically Turn Urls into Clickable Links

This plugin seeks to address certain shortcomings with WordPress’s default auto-hyperlinking function. This tweaks the pattern matching expressions to prevent inappropriate adjacent characters from becoming part of the link (such as a trailing period when a link ends a sentence, links that are parenthesized or braced, comma-separated, etc) and it prevents invalid text from becoming a mailto: link (i.e. smart@ss) or for invalid URIs (i.e. http://blah) from becoming links.

This plugin will recognize any protocol-specified URI (http|https|ftp|news)://, etc, as well as e-mail addresses. It also adds the new ability to recognize Class B domain references (i.e. “somesite.net”, not just domains prepended with “www.”) as valid links (i.e. “wordpress.org” would now get auto-hyperlinked)

Download this Plugin Free: http://coffee2code.com…(visit external link) (this url was converted to a clickable link by the AutoHyperLinks Plugin)

WordPress – Control Where Categories Are Displayed

If you ever want to exclude all  posts in specific category from being displayed on the index page of your wordpress blog, the archives, your feed, article lists, or anywhere else, you need a Category Visibility Plugin (unless you want to do the code yourself in The Loop).

After installing and reviewing a few, I am recommending the ACE Wordpress (Advanced Category Excluder) Plugin for Wordpress V2.7 +.