The newest and greatest of WordPress is now out at version 3.0. This is probably one of the most awaited version of WordPress. So, what’s so spectacular about WordPress 3.0? For the ordinary user existing, at a glance, you’d only probably notice the addition of menu management as a new feature. But under the hood, a lot of things have actually changed.
WordPress is such a powerful and flexible blogging software that most of the time I think of it as a Content Management platform rather than a blogging software.
I have this idea of creating a set of plugins that would allow people to put up a local community site for even the smallest town in the world by just using WordPress. So, months back, I started putting thoughts together on how to create the needed software to allow people to create hyperlocal sites using WordPress.
I thought I’d share some WordPress badges that I’ve created using Inkscape (a great freely available SVG graphics editor). I’ve made four badge designs — “Proudly WordPress”, “Powered by WordPress”, “WordPress Bragging Blogging Rights” (I think this one is cool), and “Get a Free Blog from WordPress”. Checkout the 125×125 and 250×250 pixel badges.
The WordPress Development team has released WordPress version 2.8.2. The new version fixes an XSS vulnerability in comment author URLs which were not being fully sanitized when displayed in the admin. An exploit is possible to redirect the logged in account to another URL from from the WordPress administration page.
It is adviced that an upgrade to version 2.8.2 is performed. You can do the upgrade either by using the WordPress upgrade tool found at Tools->Upgrade of your blog’s admin or Download WordPress 2.8.2 to perform a manual upgrade of your WordPress site.
When I read the article about the upcoming WordPress 2.9 media features, I got excited that it’s now the next thing on the WordPress dev list. It’s one of those things that I feel strongly about when it comes to WordPress. The ability to easily extend WordPress is one of its strengths. It has also grown to being a robust framework/platform for online publishing. Actually it’s more than that, you’d be surprised at how people use it to create code stuff based on it. A pretty good example would be Alex Rabe’s NextGen Photo Gallery plugin.
I’ve been cleaning up the code of the Web Directory WordPress plugin I’ve created so that I can make it available for download. I decided to start creating this plugin by using the existing core bookmarking code available in WordPress to make it easier for people that have WordPress sites to add a web directory into their blog.
My plan is to create an initial usable version that focuses on simplicity and ease of installation plus optimizing it for search engines thru the use of permalinks. I’ve also added some code so that the page title and description for the categories are properly initialized. This should add more plus points when the web directory gets crawled by the search engines.
I’ve finally segrated the code for a Web directory from the Chameleon WordPress theme and created it into a WordPress plugin. The code is now working in my computer. It uses the internal link tables that WordPress uses for its bookmarks functions instead of creating my own tables. I’m currently testing it and hopefully put it into production on one of my web sites on the Internet.
Over the following days, my goal is to test and clean up the code so that it would be easy for people to put up a web directory on their own blog without to much of a hassle and also keep it working by using available core functions in WordPress instead of re-inventing things. Once I’ve stabilized the initial version, I’ll make it available on my projects page for people to download and use.
One of the things I’ve placed here at Code Stuff is breadcrumbs navigation. Breadcrumbs navigation is very useful for web site visitors because it allows them to easily navigate a web site. It’s such a very useful feature I wonder why it hasn’t made it to the WordPress core.
I used the simple and useful WordPress plugin called Yoast Breadcrumbs by Joost de Valk. I’ve made some more updates to the Web Directory code I have been using here. Last time I made some mods to include permalinks. This time, I needed to be able to update the breadcrumbs navigation so that it will reflect the correct link category path. So I made some modifications of my own to the WordPress Breadcrumbs plugin for my needs. The modification is actually simple. I added some code so that I could filter the breadcrumbs created by the WordPress plugin. Now my web directory page’s breadcrumbs navigation is correctly updated (checkout the screenshot).
If you want a copy of the modified Yoast Breadcrumbs WordPress plugin, you can download it from the link below.
breadcrumbs.zip
I’ve been following on the upcoming version 2.8 of WordPress. One of the major focus of this next version of WordPress is the sizeable changes being done to the widgets system. I liked the idea of bringing back the good old days of drag and drop to the widgets which makes it a lot easier to configure widgets for a blog.
Besides the overhaul of the widgets component of WordPress in version 2.8, the other thing I noticed is the welcome addition of descriptions for tags. You might have noticed that prior to version 2.8 only categories have descriptions.
I’ve been putting more time to finishing my WordPress Chameleon Theme over the past few days so that I could be able to fully use it on my web sites. Once I’m done with the base code, it would be easier for me to make layout changes on the same WordPress theme.
Today, I’ve just finished putting WordPress pretty permalinks on the Web Directory module of the WordPress Chameleon theme. Links that use to look like this — “/links?cat=developers“, now look like this — “/links/developers“. I’ve also updated the module so that the proper <title> and <description> head tags will be properly set to the correct values for improved SEO and search engine indexing.
