Deborah Woehr

A huge thanks to John and Jim, who offered a great list of plugins for this new upgrade. The admin dropdown menu plugin and the Remove Max Width are essential in getting the old feel of WordPress back onto your browser.

Other plugins that work great with WordPress 2.5:

1. IImage Browser: I love this plugin because it lets you resize the image to fit perfectly within your text, make thumbnails clickable to the original size of the image, and add captions within a single dialog box. It also displays every image that you have uploaded to your server.

2. WP-ShortStat: This is a good stats plugin that tells me where my visitors are coming from, what keywords they use to find me, what websites are linking to me, etc. I was pleasantly surprised to find this plugin still working after I upgraded.

As you can see, I’m not that big on plugins, just the ones that I absolutely need.

I’ve noticed some new things in this new version, other than the media features, like writing links and the blog rating system. I’ll be exploring this upgrade for a little while until I get really comfortable with it. If you’re going to upgrade to 2.5, I would definitely plan on installing the above plugins. Otherwise, plan on hunting down the features that were so readily available in the older versions of WordPress.

I’ve been debating whether or not to upgrade my blogs to WordPress 2.5 for a couple of weeks now, but held off mainly because I was busy and I wanted to read about any bugs that needed fixing first. Ever since 2.0 came out, I’ve been cautious about jumping for the upgrades. Tonight, I decided to upgrade the blog on DeborahWoehr.com.

Upgrading was a snap, thanks to Fantastico. But once I saw the interface, I thought, “Ick.”

I liked having the navigation bar at the top, where I can gain easy access to any aspect of my blog. I’m reminded of the time my mother-in-law decided to organize my bedroom years and years ago. She organized everything so well that I couldn’t find anything. That’s what this layout feels like.

The first thing I did was try to upload an image with the new media interface. It gave me an error message, although it uploaded the image just fine. I had to copy and paste the URL into my post. Trying to make a private post proved fruitless as well; the post showed up anyway.

I hate the way they shave down the Settings so all you get is the general page. You can still access your user profile and your plugins, though. After five minutes, I still haven’t been able to find my blogroll or theme editor.

So far, my first impression of WordPress 2.5 is not good. While the media widgets are a cool feature, the interface is not user friendly. It will take some time and tweaking in order to get used to this upgrade. Not recommended.

You may have noticed a few cosmetic changes to this blog since yesterday. That’s because I upgraded from 2.0 to 2.3. The makers of WordPress raved about a “kick ass taxonomy” system, which I’ll need to explore when I have more time. For now, I knew this blog was way overdue for an upgrade. So I performed that yesterday morning.

Then I came home and started experimenting with plug-ins. Some of the ones I had didn’t work, such as the Feedburner plugin. Thankfully, my image uploader did. That’s the risk when you upgrade, losing valued plug-ins. I also experimented with widgets because I’ve been frustrated with the clutter on my sidebar. I’ve been wanting to scrunch down the archives for a while, but couldn’t figure out how to do it without breaking the blog. After 2.5 years, the list of archives and the categories had grown very long. I’m hoping someone will develop a plug-in that will collapse the links, but that’s not as big of an issue as the other two.

I decided to test out the Admin Drop Down Menus plugin. It works great on 2.3, but I’m finding that it takes getting used to, as far as looks. I’m so used to seeing the blue navigation bar, which tended to get cluttered.

What do I think of WP 2.3? So far, the only difference I see in the main interface is the Tag insertion box below the post box. I like the idea of having tags versus categories. If you’re new to blogging and would like to know the difference between these two terms, read WordPress.com’s Tags and Categories article. At this point in time, I think I would prefer tags over categories because you don’t have to keep tags in a list in my sidebar. I don’t think I’m going to bother getting the Tag Cloud plugin because I think it’s overkill and it would defeat my goal of keeping my sidebar organized.

I liked the widget interface because I can add and remove items from my sidebar without having to mess with the code. My only gripe is that I wish they had widgets for headers. The list of formats you can import into your WordPress blog has grown to include tagging, such as the popular Ultimate Tag Warrior and Jerome’s Keywords.

Kudos to the WordPress team.

One of my top goals when I returned from my vacation was to crack open this book and take a shot at building my first WordPress theme. I tried to follow the author’s step-by-step instructions but got totally confused and frustrated. This section is not for the complete WordPress novice, especially if they don’t know a lick of php or css. I know the difference, although I’m far from a whiz. Hence, why I bought this book.

In one portion of the exercise, the author blended the css code in the middle of the php code. If you’ve worked with WordPress files, you know that style.css and .php files are separate. I spent at least four hours the Sunday before last, trying to get the code in order and functioning properly. In the end, I set the book down and haven’t touched it since. I’d recommend this book for beginner bloggers because Hayder does cover the blogosphere as a whole. For theme design, fugeddaboudit. Look elsewhere.

Out of frustration last week, I took the files from this theme, uploaded them onto a test file on my server and knocked the hell out of them to see if I could produce a traditional website interface from WordPress. I stopped when the theme started to break and didn’t touch it until today. For some reason, luck was with me today because I got the skeleton of my husband’s website up, along with a Contact and a map page. Step two in this project involves learning how to write exceptional web copy that will draw in some more business. That’s for a later post.

Right now, I’ll put up my feet and celebrate this small victory.

Lorelle VanFossen has written a concise how-to book, covering every aspect of WordPress and how you can use it to create and build an outstanding blog. I read a third of this book before I began jumping to the sections that I needed to learn about or brush up on. Some tips I found useful are:

Time Management and Blogger Burnout: These are especially important if you run more than one blog.
Writing: Lorelle talks about how to use keywords and search terms to boost your search engine ranking as well as to draw human readers.
Blog SEO and Page Rank: I’ve tried to digest the information online about these topics only to find myself overwhelmed. Lorelle explains exactly how Google determine’s the page rank of a site and how to optimize your blogs without drowning the reader in geek speak.

Conclusion: I’ve been blogging for two years, so much of the information contained in this book was a review. However, if you are new to blogging or WordPress I would strongly suggest that you buy a copy of this book.

I bought this book, anticipating Chapters 7 and 9. Chapter 7 explains in detail how to construct your own WordPress Theme from a blank page, while Chapter 9 explains how to build plug-ins and widgets. I’ve read through Chapter 7, but have yet to test out the author’s tutorial. I’ll have to give you an update on that . . . or show you the result.

Conclusion: WordPress Complete is better than the Visual Quickstart Guide in that it teaches you the coding that is needed to add more functionality to your site, whether you want to create your own theme, add a photo gallery, create a pod cast, or use WordPress for a full-fledged CMS.

Aaron Brazell has written a great post called 10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.1, which explains the bells and whistles of the latest release of WordPress. I think everyone should read this article, along with Lorelle’s Fear Not WordPress 2.1 and WordPress Plugins before they upgrade.

I’m glad to see that they’ve made improvements on the Rich Text Editor (which I’ve long since turned off since the 2.0 upgrade) and the Image Uploader. They’ve also implemented a WordPress-to-WordPress import feature that will allow you to combine two or more WP blogs. That caught my eye and made me think of my On Book Design blog, which I haven’t touched since June. I thought about importing those posts onto this blog, since I have touched on book designing when I published through Lulu.

But I’ve decided against it because users have complained about their blog rolls getting screwed up. Until I read more about that and how to fix it, I’m not going to update this blog just yet.

Over the past several weeks, my “contact me “form has been attacked by spammers. As I was writing yesterday, my email notifier kept bonging at me whenever these bots would send me their crap. I finally got sick of it and looked on the WordPress Plugin site, where I found the plugin below. It requires users to answer a simple question before hitting Send. That should take care of these intrusions, I hope.

WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection

I’m not sure when this latest version is coming out or what features it’s going to bring, but the new 2.05 version has just been released, which contains more security patches. I just updated this blog and The Writers Buzz due to my newfound paranoia of hackers (i.e., the demise of the Murder and Mayhem wikki). You might want to do the same.

I ordered this book in mid-May and just now received it. If you are new to WordPress or are thinking about migrating from Blogger to WordPress, get this book. It will help you learn the basics, from how to set up and customize your site to adding podcasts and webcams to your blog.

As an intermediate user, I have learned WordPress via trial and error and many hours trying to decipher their monstrous Codex. I liked how the authors explained The Loop and the file components of the Kubrick theme in layman’s terms.

The only thing it doesn’t teach you is how to build themes from scratch, which is what I was hoping to learn. Thankfully, there is a new book due out in October called Pro WordPress Development, which I’m hoping will be as good and user-friendly as this book.

I finally found a WordPress theme that works in Firefox and Internet Exploder for the Mac and PC. Even better, it’s writing-related. Woo-hoo!

The headlines are a bit funky looking on IE–not surprising since that browser sucks. But I’ll get to that tomorrow. Gotta write.

Oh, before I close, check out the latest contest on WBA. This one offers a cash prize!