cms

WordPress Dev Cycle To Possibly Change

According to Ryan Boren, one of the lead developers behind WordPress has announced that the Automattic Dev team is considering a change to the WordPress.org development cycle.

We are considering building this extra time over the holidays into our roadmap. This would mean one less release per year. We’d release in Spring, Summer, and Fall, and then again in Spring of the following year. With six months of development time, the Spring release would contain the bigger features that don’t fit into the shorter Summer and Fall release windows.

I’m actually hoping that they go through with this decision. I’m thinking that the extra development time will help to decrease the amount of bugs in the Trac. You know, those pesky things that are more of a nuisance than an actual bug. This dev period would also give individuals more time to CATCH UP. You shouldn’t be far behind as far as versions go anyways, but the extra time could be beneficial.

Telligent Lacks Intelligents

Telligent.com Logo

Charles Stricklin has published an article today that shows off Grafiti essentially slamming WordPress. According to Charles, Telligent has purchased the keyword WordPressPodcast from Google Adwords. Upon clicking on the promotional landing page, you discover that the Grafiti CMS is THE alternative for WordPress. Telligent claims that Grafiti has a 2 minute install time when compared with the 5 minute install time for WordPress. Some notable differences between the two: Grafiti is based on Microsoft.NET and IIS technology and costs $199.00 which by the way, is a limited time price, so who knows what the final price may end up being.

The final verdict? Grafiti seems to be taking some pretty sharp jabs towards WordPress which don’t even make sense. Although they have a pretty aggressive advertising campaign going on, what they are offering with Grafiti isn’t even close to what you receive with WordPress. I don’t know who they are trying to kid, but who in their right mind would pay at least $199.00 for this stuff?

As Charles mentions on his blog, the major downfall Grafiti has going against their software is that it’s proprietary. This means you have to lean on Telligents shoulders and hope to god they never go out of business. In retrospect, WordPress is an open-source project filed under the GPL. This means, even if the major developers stepped away from the project, nothing stops you from picking up where they left off.

Ever hear of the phrase, You Get What You Pay For? Generally, it’s true. In this case however, you get $199.00 worth of crap. Enjoy.

My WordPress 2.3 Upgrade Experience

I’m writing this post within the new fancy WYSIWYG editor which is nothing more than the same editor with the exception of a new button. The new button shows me quite a few new formatting features but my favorite one is the UNDO button.

So far, my WordPress upgrade experience has been pretty good. I did encounter an upload problem in which a few folders were uploaded into other folders. In other words, some folders were not overwritten like they were supposed to be. I fixed this and re-uploaded the files which allowed the WordPress upgrade script to properly update my database.

I believe there is a bug that was created after my WordPress installation was upgraded. As you can see below, the area of my dashboard which would normally show incoming links to my site from outside sources, is now showing my own blog posts from my front page. I’m pretty sure this is not supposed to happen. This never occurred during any other WP upgrade I have performed. I have since created a forum post about it on the official WP forums to see if it’s a bug or not.

WordPRess 2.3 Bug

I knew about the tag importers being added to WordPress 2.3 but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where they were. I eventually located them within the MANAGE-IMPORT area of my WordPress admin panel. After clicking on the importer for my Ultimate Tagging Warrior plugin, all of my tags were imported into the native tagging features implemented into WP 2.3 I also experienced numerous wordpress.wp_post2cat does not exist errors which were being generated by the UTW plugin, so be sure to disable it once you complete your upgrade.

I want to give a very big thank you to everyone responsible for the automatic update notification feature. This is an invaluable time saver. After my upgrade was complete, I discovered 5 plugins which had an update available for download. The notification window provides a direct link to the plugin on the wordpress.org site where additional information along with the plugin files can be located.

Last but not least, if you are experiencing trouble with WordPress, the best place to find help is the WordPress.org forums. However, before creating a new post, be sure to perform a search to see if your question was already answered. There is nothing more annoying on a forum than seeing 50 different forum threads on the same topic which has already been answered.

You’ve read my experience, now it’s time to share yours by leaving a comment below.

Texty Rolls Out Anticipated Updates

Texty.com LogoThe easy content creation service known as Texty which I reviewed here, Simple Content Creation Using Texty, has rolled out some anticipated updates. One of those updates fixed the Google SEO problem so many users mentioned.

In each Texty edit object under “Advanced Secret Options” you can now input the URL where you plan to post your Texty. Texty claims their indexing techniques will ensure your content will be crawled by search engine spiders which was a missing feature that turned quite a few newcomers away from using the service. They have also added a privacy feature in case you wouldn’t want your content to be indexed. Before you publish your Texty Note, click the “Private” button.

New Texty Features

One of the other updates that were featured in this release is the ability to add a DIGG function to anyone of your Texty notes. This control can be found within the Advanced Options tab. I’m not sure if you’ll ever see a Texty reach the front page of DIGG but hey, it’s worth a shot.

WordPress 2.2.3 Released

Wordpress.com logoWordPress version 2.2.3 has been released. The release is slated as a “security and bug-fix” release. Considering this fixes a few security issues, it is highly recommended that you upgrade your WP install to the latest version ASAP. Considering WordPress 2.3 is around the corner, this upgrade is probably not going to sit well with a few people.

Two of the fixes in the latest version of WP are rated as “high priority“. Those two are labeled as, 4704 Invalid RSS2 Comments Feed and 4720 Users without unfiltered_html capability can post arbitrary html There were also a number of files that were changed. To see a complete list of these file changes, be sure to read WordPress 2.2.3 File Changes

Download the latest version of WordPress here http://wordpress.org/download/ Pardon me, as I commence with the upgrade! If you don’t hear from me by Monday, you’ll know why.

Happy Birthday WordPress.com

Wordpress.com LogoCan you believe that WordPress has only been around for two years? It’s true. Back on August 20th, 2005 the first blog on WordPress.com was created, that being Matt’s blog. I didn’t know this but, invitations for the WordPress.com beta were sold on ebay for as much as $90.00 Check out these insane stats that Matt published concerning what has been accomplished over the past year:

  • Created 50,334 blogs
  • Added 269,035 static pages
  • Tagged 715,905 tags on posts
  • Gotten 920,363 comments
  • Written 678,842 posts
  • Had 96,095,493 pageviews!

Wow, that’s what I call user generated! I’ve only used the stand alone WordPress CMS for a few months now, but it’s been the best damn CMS I have ever used. It’s been a pleasure to work with and it’s one of the only systems I’ve used where everything seems simple. So I’d like to take this oppurtunity to thank Matt and his crew for this awesome piece of software, and to wish everyone involved with WordPress a Happy 2nd Birthday.

Also, if WordPress.com is indeed getting the same amount of traffic as Facebook.com chances are, WP.com will see birthdays 3, 4, and 5!

Simple Content Creation Using Texty

Texty.com Logo

For webmasters who do not have the luxury of using a WYSIWYG text editor to publish posts, Texty as mentioned on Techcrunch comes in real handy providing a way for anyone to use a rich text editor to create dynamic content.

Synopses:

One of the best features found within most dynamic content management systems is the text editor used to write articles. These text editors give users an abundant amount of options while providing an ease of use factor, allowing virtually anyone to style, format and configure articles without having to know HTML. With that being said, there are still a ton of static websites that are being used today which require users to edit the page within a text editor of their choice such as Dreamweaver or CoffeeCup, require HTML knowledge to create, and last but not least, an FTP connection for uploading those pages to your site. Texty aims to eliminate most of these mundane processes. Continue reading →