Wordpress 2.4 skipped

Posted by multippt

Sounds like Wordpress developers can’t keep up with their planned schedule(and judging from the development copy, I can see why), and had to skip Wordpress 2.4 which was planned for late January. Rather, the next revision of Wordpress will be released between March to April. As Wordpress 2.4 is skipped, don’t expect to see 2.4 anytime soon. Instead, 2.5 will take its place, making Wordpress 2.4 the third time Wordpress skipped a revision number.

Hopefully a development time of 6 months should give Wordpress all that time to get some nice new features out.

An inside look at Wordpress 2.4.0

Posted by multippt

Wordpress 2.4 isn’t going to be released until weeks later (24th January), but it’s still fairly intact at its latest. Remember, this is taken from a development copy of Wordpress, and things change pretty fast when it comes with betas.

Visually…

Up front you cannot see anything different - that’s because Wordpress still uses the famous Kubrick theme and has not changed it. There are no visual changes on the front-end, but wait till you see the administration interface. This screenshot should say something:

Administration

The new control panel makes use of some pretty nice mix of colors, much vibrant compared to the old blue theme Wordpress administration interfaces have. In addition, some commonly used features - such as writing posts are now place right in front of you (well, for everyone’s convenience).

Name changes in administration panel

One small note of change in the administration panel is that the name for some tabs has been changed. Now instead of “presentation”, you see “design”, and “options” has now become “settings”. Sort of similar to the administration interace you see in Blogger.

Security Changes

When changing your password, you will now see a new thing called “password strength”. Not too unfamiliar right? This is the same sort of password length measurement thing that you see when you register a hotmail account. The longer the password the more “safer” it is. Though, length is just one factor. The password-strength checker also checks how easy the password is easy to guess (e.g. jumbled letters score higher than repeated ones in terms of strength). Well, at least it will convince more people to have longer and unique passwords.

Features?

While the changes at first glance may look pretty large, it’s actually quite small. Sadly, the development copy does not seem to have any big features added yet. Much of the changes are in the interface and usability. There are not many features added to this new version of Wordpress. Of course, as with any development version, it’s incomplete and not at full potential. Let’s hope to see some spanking nice features to go with the revamp in interface in the final release of Wordpress 2.4.

On a side note, there are (visual and coding) glitches which I would leave the development team to fix. At the moment, this release is pretty much in pieces - even the administration interface has quite a lot of touching up to do, but at least you get an idea of how Wordpress 2.4 is going to look like.

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Testing done courtesy of a friend who installed the development release on his site.

Wordpress 2.3.2

Posted by multippt

Wordpress 2.3.2 has been released and patches a security hole in Wordpress that may expose drafts and future posts in your site. Private posts are not affected. No biggy unless you do not want people to peep at what you are going to write tomorrow.

The second one might be a little bit more of concern, as it can expose your database structure (not much of a problem since almost all Wordpress installs use the same structure), and show some not-so-nice error messages on your blog.

While patching up this problem, the developers decided to give a nice little thing that you can customize Wordpress in: Error messages. The error message will show a customized page (taken from wp-content/db-error.php) if there is one, rather than a messy one which PHP generates.

Yahoo shortcuts as a win-win situation

Posted by multippt

Finally, a shortcut for making blog posts. Yahoo has practically narrowed down time needed to decorate your own posts by doing the homework for you - in the background. Whenever you write a post, Yahoo will lookup for certain images using it’s massive power and bring it straight to you. However, there’s that hidden potential it can bring - it may promote visitors to other sites as well, not just to your own.

Currently it’s available as a plugin for Wordpress.

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Social bookmarks in a dropdown

Posted by multippt

Social Dropdown has been recently released. Currently it supports a whole range of features. I guess this picture probably says it all:

You can download Social Dropdown here.

What Social Dropdown does

It puts your bookmarklets into a dropdown so that it won’t occupy a lot of space in your posts (unlike most other similar plugins). The bookmarks are available via the little arrow beside ”Bookmark This!”. Of course clicking on “Bookmark This!” will show the list of bookmarks. This dropdown in itself can be organised into rows. Clicking on the little icons in the dropdown will submit the corresponding post.

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Social dropdown

Posted by multippt

A beta version of the Social Dropdown plugin has been released on Tevine! This plugin helps put all your social bookmarks into one nice dropdown - accessible by clicking on a button.

This effectively reduces clutter, and occupies little space on your page (unlike others which practically plastered tons of social bookmarking icons just below your post). In case if you do not know what is social bookmarking, it is bookmarking done socially - and you get traffic from it!

Why is this in beta? Aside from giving me protection in case the plugin goes wrong, the plugin works great on newer browsers but not so for older ones.

Vote it up!

Posted by multippt

We figured that maybe some people are too shy to use our posting feature, so we made something that allows you to voice your opinion. A little democracy never hurts anyone right?

The voting system in Tevine is similar to other voting systems - you like the story, you vote for it. Each vote contributes a little to the “bar” you see at the bottom of each post. Fill it up, and see what happens. ;)

We will enable guest voting soon.