Dec182008
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Wordpress 2.7
Okay, fair is fair – that’s probably more a comment about my complete lack of skills rather than the embarassingly straightforward update procedure but when it comes to any kind of task like these, if it can go wrong, you’ll probably find my grubby fingerprints already all over it and smoke pouring from the back. So what is new with 2.7? They’ve given the dashboard another new lick of paint and versatility seems to be the order of the day with a ‘however you like it’ vibe to the whole process. All the content on the main page can be re-arranged (even to the point of switching from a single column layout to a double column one and vice versa). You can quickly add a post right from the main page, track draft posts, and also sort & answer comments… if unlike me, you have visitors to your website. The customisation follows through to new content sections, allowing you to set your post/page editing layout how you like it, minimising or even removing altogether any feature you hardly ever bother with. On the plug-in front, they also can be added and updated without stepping away from the comfort of your site admin, browsing the plug-in directory through a handy list of tags. Yep, soon enough your site will be groaning under the weight of countless unneeded (but must have!) plug-ins. One of my personal bugbears is also fixed – the way that adding images used to default to having a pre-defined URL and how they insisted on being thumbnail size. Both gone, I’m happy to say. Yeah, I’ll miss the manual update procedure but given how the package keeps improving with each iteration, I’ll definitely be looking forward to what Wordpress 2.8 brings! Tags / upgrade / wordpress / |
Another three to four months go by and time for another painless website back-end update, this time from Wordpress 2.6 (aka ‘Tyner’) to
Jul172008
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Wordpress 2.6
The first addition is ‘all for me’ as in my imaginary readers don’t get to feel the benefit directly. It’s the ‘Post Revisions’ feature. In short, every time I change a post, it’ll keep track of the changes and if I ever find myself deleting a chunk of text and regretting it down the line, I can simply call it back into existence. There’s even a lovely comparison function so I can view the differences between various saved versions. The ‘Press This!’ feature, gives you a bookmark link that you can drag into your browser to help you steal… *ahem* …sorry, I mean ‘blog’ about things you encounter while you’re browsing. Grab stuff on your travels and post about them straight away without that annoying ‘pasting it all together yourself’ roadbump. ‘Captions’ is a new feature which is pretty nice. I’m not sure how much mileage I’ll get out of it myself as apart from the image in the top-left of the posts, I haven’t really gone to town piccie-wise as of yet. Maybe eventually but not something I need right now. ‘Theme Preview’, as the name suggests allows me to check out how my site would look with a different theme applied without having to apply it (and probably break the website in the process). Good, but as I’d already got an add-on that let me do that already, it’s not a huge bonus for me. I can get rid of the add-on (and not worry about it going out-of-date with future Wordpress versions) and having the whole thing tied together is a plus. There’s also some caching gumpf called ‘Gears’ which I doubt I’ll be using, a word count feature (woohoo?) on the post page (this post contains 459 words, fact fans!) that doesn’t really set my world on fire, gallery sorting (no galleries so again, not a biggie here) and the plugins interface has been spruced up and is now better organised. That last one is cool but it’s not like it was an horrific mess beforehand though. As per usual, the continued updates to Wordpress bring some funky little additions and gives existing features a pleasing tweak. Overall, it’s a great package that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone wishing to talk complete arse to a non-existent visitors. Tags / upgrade / wordpress / |
Another patch rolls round and again it’s pretty painless. I might even start believing I know what I’m doing if things continue to work as expected like this.
Mar302008
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WordPress 2.5
In terms of changes, there’s really not much I’ll be taking advantage of straight off the bat. There’s a nice gallery feature but since I’ve not needed (or immediately foresee the need for) such a feature, that’s neither here nor there. I can fiddle with the tags, which is nice. I had some experimental tags I’d put in when I was first faffing with the site that needed binning and they’d annoyed me ever since. Bye-bye to those. The dashboard is all change with an emphasis on simplifying things. That’ll take some getting use to but it all looks fairly straightforward and some things – like media management, look more fleshed out. The post editor is also supposed to be less ‘intrusive’ which is something I can relate to. I’ve had a little head vs. desk fun due to WordPress deciding what I’d typed into the HTML side would be best changed to something else completely. ‘Search’ now also checks pages rather than just posts. Not a big deal for me personally (I only have my ‘About’ page) but I can see it coming in handy down the line. All told, there’s some nice tweaks and the fact that updating didn’t tear my hand-mangled theme a new one scores big from me. Right, when is the next update? Tags / upgrade / wordpress / |
A sucker for shiny new things, I’ve just finished upgrading my website backend from