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WP Admin Area Options

April 21, 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web, Downloads

If you’ve already upgraded to WordPress 2.5, then you know that 2.5 brings a BIG change to the admin area. Automattic worked with a team from Happy Cog Studios to redesign the admin area for greater ease and usability. However, while this improvement may help users new to WordPress, people used to the old admin area may be having some issues acclimating to the new interface. In fact some “power users” downright hate it. While that’s a perfectly valid point of view, I consider myself a power user, and I actually really like the new interface. That’s not to say I love everything about it, though.

The great thing about WordPress and it’s big, wonderful community is that if there is something you are dissatisfied with, there’s probably someone else out there just like you. Unlike you, they may know how to write a plugin or a hack to fix it. In the past few weeks I’ve come across several of these fixes and I thought I’d highlight them.

Comments

Posted by Emily @ 3:04 pm

Have you upgraded yet?

April 16, 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web

WordPress 2.5 has been out for over 2 weeks, have you upgraded yet? I waited about a week to make sure there were no major issues right after the release, but as of this past weekend all my personal/business WP sites as well an a good portion of my client’s sites have been upgraded. If you haven’t upgraded yet, what are you waiting for?

I’ve come across several bloggers who are waiting for the release of 2.5.1. I can’t really blame them for this logic. It should fix all of the major bugs that have cropped up and by the time it comes out in two or three weeks time, plugin authors who were behind the times, should have finally upgraded their plugins. Normally, I might agree with them and for a moment, I even considered this myself, until I read this announcement on Technorati that “vulnerable” WordPress blogs are no longer being indexed. What constitutes a vulnerable blog? Anything that is NOT WordPress 2.5.

This announcement seemed kind of bullying to me at first: UPGRADE OR ELSE! But they have a point. There are valid security problems in older versions of WP. If you care about your site, then security should be your number 1 concern. I certainly don’t mean to post this to scare people or to say that there is anything wrong with using WordPress, but I know from years of first hand experience that MANY people do not take security seriously. I can promise you, as soon as your site has been hacked, this is something you are going to take seriously. A few days ago I upgraded a WordPress site that was still using version 1.5! That’s at least 2 years old and there’s really no excuse for it. If you don’t keep current you are pretty much inviting hackers to your website.

4 comments

Posted by Emily @ 4:20 pm

If you are having any problems with your 2.5 installation or are just generally confused about where certain things are now, this post at Weblog Tools Collection has a very comprehensive list of helpful answers and fixes to problems.

Update: More FAQs.

April 2, 2008 | Comments

WordPress 2.5 has been released!

March 29, 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web

WordPress 2.5 is finally out today. From the Dev Blog:

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.