Tag Archives: wordpress

WordPress 3.0 arrives

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I’ve just been notified by my WordPress system that 3.0 has now officially arrived.

I’ve just installed the update and from what I can see, there’s no major overhaul. However, there are a few minor adjustments that make a big difference. Updating plugins has become much quicker with the new updates page on the Dashboard. In addition, a few cosmetic changes have made browsing the WordPress Dashboard much more straightforward and intuitive.

If you want to grab the new update, either do an automatic upgrade from your WordPress Dashboard, or head to wordpress.org and download it from there!

[FIX] WordPress Automatic Upgrade woes – “Installation Failed”

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WordPress is brilliant, undoubtedly, but there are some things that really drive me insane.

Ever since WordPress 2.8.1 was released, I haven’t been able to use the automatic upgrade feature in WordPress because it simply does not work. This problem has been identified by many other WordPress users, but I know that not everyone has the problem.

Here’s what I mean – every time I try to upgrade WordPress the following problem arises:

Wordpress auto upgrade

It is as simple as that. No error messages, no PHP warnings, just “Installation Failed”.

I’ve been searching everywhere for a fix but I can’t find one anywhere. It’s beginning to really annoy me now. I’ve just ignored it for a while and upgraded WordPress manually – but it really drives me mad having to take down GEEK! and then put it back up.

Has anyone found a fix for this problem?

Update 13.9.09: A big thanks to “lujcas”, who has posted a comment with a fix to this problem. I’ve tested it and it seemed to work for me. To make it easier for everyone, I’ve uploaded the file he added to the GEEK! download server, so you can download a copy here. You just need to unzip the file and place it in the wp-includes directory on your WordPress install and overwrite any previous file.

Top 5 WordPress plugins for April – July 2009

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Back in February I did a top 5 WordPress plugins. Now, I think it is probably time I updated it a little, so I’m going to do another top 5 plugins. I use these plugins quite actively on GEEK! so I feel the creators of these plugins deserve a little thanks from me.

So, here are my top 5 WordPress plugins for April – July 2009:

  1. Executable PHP Widget: Sometimes it can be really annoying that sidebars in WordPress don’t support PHP code. Maybe you want to have a login/logout link to your blog in the sidebar. Sadly, the standard “Text” widget in WordPress only supports text and HTML, but not PHP. This plugin sorts that problem for you. Activate the plugin and then select the “PHP code” widget from the “Widgets” section of the WordPress dashboard. The new widget will accept text and HTML, as well as PHP, so it can be really helpful.
  2. Clean Archives Reloaded (external): This plugin lets you create an archive page for your posts really easily. It does all the work for you. You simply install the plugin and it does the rest. Simply create a page that you want to have the archive on, insert the code for the plugin, and the job is done.
  3. Full Comments on Dashboard (external): Find it annoying when WordPress doesn’t show full comments on the WordPress dashboard? I do, so I installed this plugin, and the problem was solved. There’s no configuration for this plugin – you just install it, activate it, and it starts working straight away.
  4. Lock Out: Need to do maintenance to your WordPress website or blog? This is a really simple plugin that locks all users out of your website, except yourself of course. You can set a customized message to let your viewers know that the site is offline for maintenance. It’s a very handy little plugin. Oh, a word of warning – the WordPress plugin site claims it only works to WordPress 2.5. However, I’m on WordPress 2.8.2 (at the time of writing) and the plugin works absolutely fine.
  5. Google XML Sitemaps (external): This is a great plugin that handles all of your sitemaps for you. It creates your sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz file for you. It then hands over all the information to search engines such as Google, Ask Search and MSN Search (or Bing – whatever they call it now!).

Those are my top 5 plugins for now. I’ve used all of them for several weeks (some for months) and they’ve all been really helpful and easy to use.

I’ll do another top 5 in a couple of months, but for now – the above are my favourites! Enjoy.

WordPress 2.8 live and ready to go

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The WordPress team have recently finished the latest addition to the WordPress family.

WordPress 2.8 includes a huge range of new and useful features. Here are just a few that can be really handy:

  • You can choose how many columns you’d like on the dashboard, which is very handy if you have a larger monitor.
  • You now have either 1 or 2 columns on the New Post/Edit Posts page.
  • There is now a theme browser and theme auto installer.
  • The Widgets page has been revamped, with handy new additions such as Inactive Widgets for future use.
  • There is now syntax highlighting on code pages, such as the Edit Plugins pages.

That’s just some of the new features, but it is definitely worth the update.

If you already have WordPress 2.7 or higher installed, you should have been notified on the Dashboard and you will be able to auto upgrade. If you are using a version below 2.7 or you want to upgrade manually, you can download the update from http://wordpress.org/download/.

Enjoy!

WordPress 2.8 Beta 2 now available

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In case you aren’t already aware, WordPress have been doing some work on the upcoming release of WordPress 2.8.

They’ve just served up beta 2 of WordPress 2.8, so if you’d like to try it, have a look here.

If you didn’t see GEEK!’s review of WordPress 2.8 Beta 1, you can check it out here.

That’s all for now. I’ll write up a review if it looks worth it. I haven’t actually investigated beta 2 yet, so it may just be bugfixes. Enjoy!