All posts tagged ‘WordPress’

File Under: Blog Publishing
Dec
14
2011

New WordPress 3.3: Less Flash, More Responsive Design

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WordPress has released version 3.3. Dubbed “Sonny” after jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, WordPress 3.3 packs in a number of worthwhile upgrades, including a new responsive design that adapts the WordPress admin to smaller screens.

To get the latest version head over to the WordPress downloads page. If you’re already using WordPress you can update from the WordPress dashboard (naturally we suggest backing up your files and database before you upgrade).

Among the changes that make WordPress 3.3 well worth the upgrade is the new responsive admin design. While there are mobile apps from managing your WordPress site on the go, the actual web admin has never adapted to small screens. That changes with WordPress 3.3 and its new responsive admin page, which reflows content to fit the screen you’re using.

Responsive design — that is, using liquid layouts and scaling media to fit any screen size — is moving into the mainstream in a hurry. The past year has seen several high-profile websites relaunched with responsive designs, but WordPress 3.3 is likely the most widely used site yet to embrace responsive design.

Other changes in WordPress 3.3 include a slicker sidebar with “flyout” submenus which put everything in the admin site just a single click away. There’s also a new drag-and-drop uploader, which means you can drag and drop images from your desktop right into the media upload box in the admin (provided you’re using a browser that supports HTML5′s drag-and-drop API). Behind the scenes WordPress is using Plupload to handle the drag-and-drop features. In browsers that support it Plupload will use HTML5; for older browsers it falls back to Flash.

Anyone working on a site with numerous writers and editors will be happy to know that this release features much improved co-editing support. If you’ve ever seen messages like “Warning: [username] is currently editing this post,” you’ll be happy to know that it will now only appear when someone is actively editing a post. Previously the message would often appear even if your co-writer simply left the window or tab open in their browser.

For a complete list of changes and new features in WordPress 3.3, see the release notes.

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File Under: Blog Publishing
Jun
30
2011

WordPress 3.2: Write More, IE Less

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WordPress has released an upgrade for the popular, self-hosted blogging platform. Unlike the last few WordPress upgrades, which focused on improving developer tools, WordPress 3.2 is primarily about changes ordinary users will appreciate. The revamped admin section, for instance, offers a new “distraction-free,” full screen editor, and, as we noted earlier, this version finally drops support for Internet Explorer 6.

If you’d like to upgrade, head over to the WordPress site and download a copy of WordPress 3.2.

The theme for WordPress’ latest incarnation is “faster and lighter.” That’s reflected in new tools like the simplified admin interface, which offers a fullscreen editor mode. The fullscreen mode is modeled on the interface found in writing apps like WriteRoom or OmmWriter, where the focus is primarily the text, and not the bells and whistles on the main new post page.

Another aspect of the faster and lighter motto for WordPress 3.2 means eliminating the cruft, also known as dropping support for IE 6. That won’t of course affect your site’s visitors (unless your theme has dropped IE 6), but it does mean that the WordPress 3.2 admin won’t work in IE 6, something to keep in mind if you’re upgrading a site that has numerous admin users.

For now WordPress hasn’t dropped support for IE 7, though an early outline of what to expect in WordPress 3.2 did say that this release will also start the end-of-life cycle for Internet Explorer 7.

For a full list of the new features found in WordPress 3.2, head over to the release notes page.

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File Under: Blog Publishing, Browsers
May
24
2011

WordPress Drops Support for IE 6

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The popular blog publishing tool WordPress has joined the growing cadre of sites dropping support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 web browser. The recently upgraded WordPress.com brings a handful of new features and a revamped, cleaner design in the admin pages, but perhaps the biggest news in the release is that the admin pages no longer support IE 6.

Users visiting the admin section of WordPress.com with IE 6 will now see a message to upgrade their browser (the same message will appear in the self-hosted WordPress 3.2 when it is released in June). The WordPress blog says it’s dropping IE 6 because, “it has required increasingly complex code trickery to make the WordPress dashboard work in the IE 6 browser, which was introduced 10 years ago and does not support current web standards.”

WordPress is just the latest in a long list of sites that have abandoned IE 6, including Gmail, YouTube, Basecamp and hundreds of others.

Indeed you’d be hard pressed to find a web developer who wants to keep supporting IE 6. Even Microsoft has set up a website that essentially dances on the grave of IE 6 (after WordPress announced it would drop IE 6, Microsoft actually said “thank you WordPress“).

However, according to Net Applications, IE 6 still has almost 12 percent user share worldwide. In the U.S. the number is just under 3 percent, but in China it’s still nearly 35 percent.

Compounding the problem are the number of corporate intranets that require IE 6. Microsoft is hard at work trying to convince large corporations to upgrade — if you’re still using IE 6, that means you haven’t upgraded to Windows 7, which is Microsoft’s real goal with the kill IE 6 campaign — but for Microsoft’s biggest customers, upgrading means investing millions of dollars in new infrastructure.

While developers may enjoy dropping IE 6 because of its subpar support for web standards, for end users that’s generally not a concern. What is, or at least should be, the bigger concern for users is that IE 6 is less secure.

If you’re part of the tiny segment of users that can — but haven’t — upgraded from IE 6, we suggest doing so. Grab a copy of Firefox or Chrome and join the modern web.

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File Under: APIs, Blog Publishing, Web Basics
May
11
2011

Speed Up Your WordPress Site With Google’s New Page Speed API

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Google’s Page Speed testing tool, which recently went from a browser add-on to a web-based tool, now sports a new API. The Page Speed Online API allows outside applications to send URLs to Page Speed and get back a list of things the site developer can do to speed up the page in question.

If you’d like to try it, head over to the new documentation page and request an API key. Sample apps include using the Page Speed Online API to display suggestions for speeding up sites or even combining the API with the Google Charts API to show a visual breakdown of the page’s resources.

For a more practical example of how the Page Speed Online API can help out your site, check out the latest version of the W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress. If you’re not already using W3 Total Cache in your WordPress installation, we highly recommend you install it, especially now that the plugin taps into the Page Speed API. W3 Total Cache now sends your pages to the Page Speed Online API and then offers Page Speed suggestions, right in the WordPress dashboard.

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File Under: Blog Publishing
Jun
17
2010

In Walked Blog: WordPress Hits 3.0 With ‘Thelonious’

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WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms on the web, reached a new milestone Thursday with its 3.0 release.

This one is nicknamed “Thelonious,” and you can run an update your own WordPress installation by clicking on the update link at the top of your blog dashboard. It’s also available for download.

The big news is that WordPress MU, a multisite tool that can be used to run a whole network of blogs, has become one of WordPress’ default features. You can now manage as many different blogs as you want from one single WordPress installation.

There are a number of updates to the user-facing part of WordPress. The admin has been redesigned: It’s been slimmed down and made easier to navigate with a more accessible layout and color scheme. Some of the menu choices have been renamed to be more descriptive.

There are also new contextual help tabs on every panel inside the admin, so it’s less likely you’ll be left wondering, “what’s this do?” For promoting your posts on Twitter, there’s a new tool that lets you generate a short URL for your post as you’re composing it.

The WordPress team has built a new default theme called “Twenty Ten” to show off all the new features in Thelonious. Much like Kubrick, the old default theme, Twenty Ten is pretty minimal, but it’s a good starting point for learning how to tweak and customize WordPress.

For theme developers and site administrators, WordPress 3.0 has a number of enhancements. The new MU integration is a big plus if you’re running a blog network, or even two different sites that share resources and authors. There’s also a new set of APIs you can use to make building custom headers, backgrounds, menus and custom post types easier. To see the full list of enhancements, see the list at the WordPress Codex.

Here’s a video tour of the new stuff:

Continue Reading “In Walked Blog: WordPress Hits 3.0 With ‘Thelonious’” »

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File Under: Monkey Business
Mar
5
2010

Welcome to the All New Webmonkey

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monkey_newpaint

As you may have noticed, we’ve given Webmonkey an entirely new coat of paint.

The visual design has been refreshed — something we’ve been doing every couple of years since we launched in 1996 — and we honestly think the site has never looked better. It took a lot of hard work by everyone on the Wired.com technical and design teams to pull it off.

As pretty as it is, there are other changes behind the scenes that we feel are just as important. We simplified the site navigation and upgraded our search tool, making it much easier to find blog posts and tutorials around specific topics. We also upgraded our publishing system, which will allow us to use photos, screenshots and galleries in more interesting ways in our reviews and tutorials.

Most notably, however, this latest redesign of Webmonkey brings to an end a two year experiment. In May of 2008, we moved all of the tutorial content on the site (over 500 articles and reference pages) to a wiki. We asked all of our readers to chip in and help improve our educational content by contributing edits. Many of you jumped in, offering updates, tips, links and corrections. Certain communities really made a difference — in particular, our Django tutorial, our Python tutorial and our series on JavaScript frameworks all benefitted greatly from reader edits. We sincerely appreciate all of the work that everyone put in to improve our content.

But the wiki experiment didn’t pan out. Spam became a huge problem, and despite our best efforts to automate our defenses, keeping spam bots and vandals off the site put serious strain on our small team. Also, while MediaWiki is great software (we’ll continue to use it on Wired’s How-To Wiki), fully incorporating the wiki content into the rest of Webmonkey, which was and still is running WordPress, proved to be a challenge. Search, site navigation and content discovery were suffering because of it.

In February, we froze edits on the wiki and began porting everything into WordPress. All of the legitimate edits and updates that were made by our readers while the wiki pages were open to the public have been preserved in the WordPress versions. We also found some time to update some of the older articles, too.

Now, the tutorials easier to find. They look better (thanks to Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter) and the multi-page lessons are easier to navigate. And while the spam bot armies are locked out for good, the tutorials are open for comments just like blog posts. So if you spot something that needs updating or fixing, just leave a note and we’ll attend to it.

There’s still some work to be done. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll continue updating the content library, beefing up the number of templates in the Reference section and building out the directories. In the near future, we’re going to install Disqus to handle comments, so you will be able to log in using OpenID, Facebook Connect, your Twitter or Yahoo credentials, or an existing Disqus login if you want to leave a comment anywhere on the site.

So for now, click around the site. Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook if you haven’t already. And of course, please let us know what you think of the new Webmonkey in the comments.

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File Under: Blog Publishing, Visual Design, Web Services
Dec
23
2009

Typekit Now Offering Custom Fonts For WordPress Blogs

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Typekit, a web service that helps designers use elaborate typefaces in their web projects, has announced an easy way to use custom fonts on WordPress.com blogs. That means your WordPress.com hosted blogs can now take advantage of Typekit’s font library in just a few clicks.

Typekit is like a YouTube for fonts. Browse through Typekit’s library of available fonts, pick one you like and cut and paste some code into your site. As we noted when we first looked at Typekit earlier this year, the service is one of the easiest ways for web designers to use creative fonts without sacrificing web standards or violating font licenses.

With the new WordPress.com features, you don’t even need to know HTML or mess with any code to take advantage of Typekit.

To use the new Typekit features, just log in to your WordPress.com dashboard and click on the Appearance menu in the left-hand navigation menu. On the Appearance page you’ll find a new option, “Typekit Fonts,” with a place to add your Kit ID.

To get your Kit ID, you’ll need to create an account at Typekit.com and select the free option. From there, you can paste over the code and chose from any of Typekit’s fonts.

Not using WordPress.com? No problem, there are already two plugins that make it easy to integrate Typekit into a self-hosted WordPress blog. If you’re on another blogging platform or custom site you can still use Typekit — see our earlier hands-on review of Typekit for details on how to use Typekit on your site.

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File Under: Blog Publishing
Nov
7
2008

WordPress 2.7 in 63 Seconds

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The blogistas behind WordPress have created a short movie that quickly introduces the new interactive interface coming in with the next release of the blogging software. Embedded above, the movie shows the drag and drop dashboard and a post screen that can also have components rearranged.

Web developers and advanced bloggers may feel like a comic book fan dissecting the latest Spider-Man trailer, pausing and re-watching their favorite portions.

The dashboard is perhaps the biggest change. In early versions of WordPress the dashboard was mainly used to show the latest WordPress development news. Recently the team added a more modular dashboard and now it is completely customizable on-the-fly. With WordPress 2.7 you can even compose a post and reply to comments from the dashboard.

Want to see it in action on your own blog? It’s still in beta, but you can download the snazzy new version here.

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File Under: Blog Publishing
Oct
15
2008

PollDaddy Switches Into Automattic

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PollDaddy pollPollDaddy, the widget maker that lets bloggers add polls and surveys to their site, is now part of WordPress company Automattic. Founder Matt Mullenweg described looking around the web at similar products and compared PollDaddy to WordPress itself:

“Two guys in Ireland with a quirky company name were cleaning up with some of the largest and most respected websites using their service on a daily basis. They weren’t the biggest, but they had the high end of the market. It seemed to be the WordPress of the polling space.”

PollDaddy burst onto the scene over two years ago. We first covered the tool at Widgets Live in 2006.

Automattic wasted no time integrating PollDaddy. It added a PollDaddy plugin with the company as author. Even bigger, it added an option for polls on WordPress.com, the company’s hosted solution.

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File Under: Blog Publishing, Software & Tools
Oct
2
2008

Make Your Blog an OpenID Provider

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OpenID options

There’s a brand new plugin for WordPress that now fully supports the power of OpenID. Will Norris and Chris Messina have released version 3 of the OpenID plugin for WordPress, which lets you turn your blog into an OpenID provider. To take full advantage of the plugin, you’ll also need the XRDS-Simple plugin, a service discover framework.

As with previous versions, users can login with an OpenID to leave a comment. This is especially useful for blogs that require registration that ordinarily would keep users from leaving comments. OpenID is even a good option for sites that allow anonymous comments, as it gives users a way to legitimize their comment, possibly avoiding administrator moderation.

Norris has a full post on the new plugin. The new features that excite me are the ability to be an OpenID provider. This is often the only way large companies support OpenID, but it’s been difficult for Joe Blogger to be able to do the same. With the latest plugin, you can use the base domain as your OpenID. You can also allow other bloggers or commenters on your blog to have their own OpenIDs, something like example.com/author/username.

Another great feature, if you’re only using the plugin for yourself, is a simple way to delegate to another OpenID service. At the bottom of your user profile (Users menu in the admin, then Your Profile), is the option for OpenID delegation.

OpenID delegation

Here you can choose another OpenID provider to handle authentication, while still using your own domain as your OpenID identifier. This gives you the power to change providers in the future, and appear the same to others. That’s about as open as it gets.

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