Author Archive

WordPress 3.0 Now Available

June 17, 2010 by Emily  

Around the Web,Downloads

WordPress 3.0, which feels like it’s been a long time in the making (though it’s only been about 6 months) is finally out! There are lots of new features in 3.0, including:

• WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
• New default theme “Twenty Ten” takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress.
• New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
• Custom header and background APIs.
• Contextual help text accessed under the Help tab of every screen in the WordPress administration.
• Ability to set the admin username and password during installation.
• Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the process.
• Support for shortlinks.
• Improved Custom post types and custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support. (Try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities.)
• A lighter admin color scheme to increase accessibility and put the focus more squarely on your content.

You can go to this page to read the whole long list of all the new additions to 3.0 or you can just watch this video for the highlights:

You should see the upgrade link appear in your WP admin soon or you can download it here if you want to install manually. As always, if you’re a Swank Web Hosting client and you need help with your upgrade, please contact us!

Notice to Hosting Customers: Server Upgrade

May 21, 2010 by Emily  

News

One of our servers, called Swanky, will be undergoing some upgrades starting at 1am EST on Sunday, May 23. The server will be offline for 3-6 hours while these upgrades are taking place. The upgrades will add more processing power to the server which will help increase it’s speed and performance time as well as make it better suited to run process-heavy WordPress powered sites (which most of our customers have).

If you are not sure which of our servers your account is on, you can find out by logging into your cPanel and looking for the server name under the Stats heading on the left side.

All accounts on the server will be checked after the upgrades take place and the server comes back online, but if you notice any problems with your site after 7am on Sunday morning, please contact us to let us know.

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: