WordPress 2.9 “Carmen” is out!
December 21, 2009 by Emily
Around the Web
Late on Friday they finally released WordPress 2.9. Have you upgraded yet? Most people should be able to do it with the click on a button at this point, but if not you can download it here.
If you haven’t upgraded yet, here are some of the new features you’ll have when you do:
- Built-in image editor that lets you crop, edit, rotate and scale your images.
- Global “trashcan”, which means that posts or comments you delete won’t immediately go away into the ether. So you can restore anything you deleted by accident.
- Easier video embedding.
- Easily assign thumbnails for all your posts, which are great for magazine style blogs and food blogs. (You can see an example of how I used the new Post Thumbnail feature on Cooking with Michele. The thumbnails are being utilized for the “related posts” under every post, as well as on the archives, categories and search pages.) Here’s a great tutorial if you want to know how to set up Post Thumbnails on your site.
- Automatic database optimization, which is an important thing to do to keep your WP install running well, but most people who aren’t designers/developers wouldn’t have any clue how to do themselves. Now all you have to do is add this your wp-config file:
define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);
That’s just some of the big stuff, there are tons of small improvements and bug fixes. You can read a longer list over on the Dev Blog. Or you can watch this video for the highlights:
3 commentsSecure your WordPress Blog. Upgrade Now!
September 5, 2009 by Emily
Around the Web
There is a worm that has been making it’s way around since yesterday that is attacking WordPress blogs with older versions. If you haven’t upgraded to the current version, please do so right now. Otherwise there is a very high chance your blog will be compromised and it’s much harder to clean up a hacked blog than to upgrade it and keep it secure in the first place.
I’ve noticed some confusion among users at other sites, so I want to make this clear. If you have the current version of WP, which is 2.8.4, you are safe, your blog is immune from this worm. If you have an older version, especially a much older version, you need to upgrade ASAP. Also, this only applies to self-hosted WP blogs. Blogs on wordpress.com aren’t affected because they are always current.
Matt goes into specifics about this worm and the importance of upgrading over on the dev blog and I encourage you to go read it.
How to add Related Posts with (or without) Thumbnails to your WP Blog
July 20, 2009 by Emily
Tutorials
Adding related posts to your blog is a great way to help your readers find other posts on your site that interest them. And if you have ads, increasing the number of pageviews on your blog can turn out to be quite lucrative. I recently had a request from a client to use a certain widget that she had seen on many other blogs that adds a list of recent posts along with a thumbnail image from that post. But after looking at the widget and researching the many other plugins that are available to add this functionality, I decided I wanted to find a way to code it directly into the template.
One reason for this is that the more plugins installed on a blog, the more that can slow down the loading time of that blog. If you can hard-code a function into the template, it’s almost always preferable to using a plugin. Plus many of the plugins or widgets I looked at gave very little control over things like styling or where the list appears in the template or even how they even figured out what was “related”. What if you want them to be related by tag instead of category or vice versa? What if you just want other posts by the same author?
After doing some more googling and modifying some of the code I found I figured out how to do everything I wanted to and more. My client was extremely pleased with the results and was amazed that I’d even been able to implement it without using a plugin or the widget she had originally wanted:
“It IS cool! A zillion people are going to see it now and want it on their WP blogs! Thanks!”
Which leads us to this post. I thought I would share my findings so that you can implement the same feature on your own WordPress blog. Below I will show you how to add related posts by category, tag or author. I will preface this by saying you should probably have some very basic knowledge about how to edit a template in WordPress, but for the most part, you can copy the code directly and paste it into your template. That’s it. For people with more advanced knowledge I’ll point out things that you can edit further and customize to your liking.
