WordPress has launched the much awaited WordPress 3.0. Named as “Thelonious”, this is the thirteenth major release of WordPress.

Major Changes in this version of WordPress are as follows:

From the User Point of View:

• A New default “Twenty Ten” theme, ditching the previous “Kubrick” theme.
  
• Multi-site functionality through which you can manage a large number of blogs from a single wordpress installation.
• A lighter interface and a contextual help on every screen.
• Bulk Updates through which you can 15 plugins at once with a single click.

From the Developer Point of View:

• New APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies.
• The long awaited merge of WordPress and WordPress MU code enabling the multi site functionality.
• 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements.

For a full feature list, you can visit the wordpress version 3.0 changelog or watch the video below:

Have you upgraded to WordPress version 3.0? Do let us know how it went.

[WordPress Development]

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• Wordpress 3.0 Release Candidate Out

WordPress team has launched the release candidate (RC) of WordPress 3.0, coinciding with the 7th Birthday of WordPress.

This release means that the development of WordPress 3.0 is almost complete and will be out soon.

Features of WordPress 3.0 Release Candidate:

1. Custom Menus.
2. Support for Multi Sites.
3. Look of the WordPress admin has been lightened up a little bit, so we can focus more on your content with less distractions.

WordPress also stated that there has been some major changes in WordPress 3.0. So all you plugin authors, start testing out your plugins now, so that your plugin is compatible with the final version of WordPress 3.0.

However if you are testing the RC version and come across any bug, then do report the bugs in any one of the below mentioned methods:

• Report it on the wp-testers mailing list.
• Join the dev chat and tell us live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev.
• File a bug ticket on the WordPress Trac.

Download WordPress 3.0 RC1

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• Wordpress 3.0 “Thelonious” Out

So what is new in the version 2.8.1:

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced.Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.

For a full changelog since WordPress 2.8 visit here.

If you are already using WordPress 2.7 and above, upgrade to WordPress 2.8.1 using the inbuilt automatic upgrade, else Download WordPress 2.8.1 now.

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How to implement Related Posts in WordPress without any plugins?

It is very simple. Just go to your single.php file in WordPress dashboard. (Dashboard -> Appearance -> Editor -> Single.php) and put this code where you want to display the posts.

<?php
$tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID);
if ($tags) {
$tag_ids = array();
foreach($tags as $individual_tag) $tag_ids[] = $individual_tag->term_id;

$args=array(
'tag__in' => $tag_ids,
'post__not_in' => array($post->ID),
'showposts'=>5, // Number of related posts that will be shown.
'caller_get_posts'=>1
);
$my_query = new wp_query($args);
if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
echo '<h3>Related Posts</h3><ul>';
while ($my_query->have_posts()) {
$my_query->the_post();
?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"
title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">
<?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php
}
echo '</ul>';
}
}
?>

That is all. Now it will automatically generate all the related posts based on the tags used in the particular post. Do you also have any such methods? Then do let me know of it via comments.

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Here are few steps through which you can achieve the same:

First go to your stylesheet ( The file would be mostly style.css) and add this following code

.authcomment {
background-color: #B3FFCC !important;
}

Then go to your comments.php file and search for the line having something like

<li class=”<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>

and replace it by

<li class=”<?php
if (1 == $comment->user_id)
$oddcomment = “authcomment”;
echo $oddcomment;?>

Keep in mind that, the default author of wordpress blog is “admin”, therefore the default value of “user_id” is ’1′, so if you have deleted the default “admin” user and have created your own user ID, then you need to change the value of “user_id” above to your User ID, which can be easily found by going to Users -> Authors & Users in your WordPress Dashboard and hovering over the ‘Posts’ field of the user ID you have created. The URL would be something like

http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/edit.php?author="user_id".

That’s it. Now you can enjoy having a different and distinguishing color for all your comments, which will definitely improve the visibility of your comments for other visitors.

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WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platform, has released 2.8 Beta 1 today and it seems they have added a lot of features to this version of WordPress.

Some of its new features are:

The full list of features is available here and to download WordPress 2.8 Beta 1, head over here

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WordPress.tv has released a nice how-to video on how to post to your wordpress.com blog via email.

And, With the mobile internet growing exponentially day by day, this video might come in handy for all the bloggers using wordpress.com.

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Though I just love the new features of WordPress 2.7,  one of its most nagging things is "Post Revisions".  If you don’t know what Post Revisions is, well it is a wiki like tracking system for both Posts and Pages which might come in handy for multi author blogs.

It keeps every post revision in the wp-posts database. Sometime and some posts later, the database will keep on getting bigger and finally becomes a big bloated database.

Fortunately, there are ways to disable the Post revisions, if you don’t want it.

The Manual Way

1. Open your wp-config.php file which is usually in the wordpress home directory.

2. Now Add this line

define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

and save the file.

Thats all, Now WordPress will not attempt to save  any revisions, except the one AutoSave per post.

Plugins

Well, if you don’t want to risk the manual way, you can try the Revision Control Plugin. This plugin give the complete control to the user whether he want to enable/ disable Post revisions. You can also limit the number of post revisions or even delete specific post revisions via this plugin.

Now, you might ask, what about the existing revisions? How to delete that?

Well, that is simple as well, All you need to do is run a simple SQL query on your database and you will be done.

At this point, I would recommend you to take a backup of your database, just in case, something goes wrong in the process.

Once Backup is done, Just open your phpMyAdmin or anything else you use for database access, and run this query

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type="revision";

That is all. Now all the post revisions have been deleted and as well as the post revisions feature have been disabled.

When I did the above procedures, I reduced my database by 2.5 MB.

Impressive, Ain’t it?

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• Wordpress 2.7 Beta 1 Out

MySQL is an Amazing Database but one of its biggest grouse is that it cannot clean by itself. And as the time passes, the clutter in your wordpress table keeps on increasing, making your blog load slower. Therefore it is always good to optimize your database once in a while.

Optimize DB from Joost De Valk makes it very simple to optimize your database.

You simply have to install the plugin and activate it. Once activated, you can then go to Tools -> Optimize DB in your WordPress dashboard. It will explain you in detail, how much data the table contains and by how much can it be optimized.

Once you click “Optimize Now”, all your MySQL tables get optimized automatically .

How do you optimize your database, manually or through some plugin? If you use a Plugin, then which one do you use?

Optimize DB Plugin

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The security issue is an XSS exploit that affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x.

If you are interested only in rectifying the security fix, you can simply copy the wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.

2.6.5 in addition to the XSS fix, also contains 3 other small fixes. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision, the second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types and the third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests.

For a full list of what files have been changed, you can check the full changeset between 2.6.3 and 2.6.5.

WordPress also added that they are skipping version 2.6.4 and jumping from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds.

Download WordPress 2.6.5

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