learn wordpress now – how to blog!

Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category

WordPress 2.7 is on the way and today I uploaded the beta1 version of the new release to this blog.

The upgrade went well and everything on the blog seems to behave as before. Plugins are still working, widgets are still displaying, theme is hanging together fine.

There’s a new dashboard interface which will take a bit of getting used to but an exciting new feature is the ability to have a sticky post on the front page.  This means you can have one post at the top of the page and all subsequent posts will scroll below it.

I haven’t yet explored all the new gizmos but what I do know is that I’ll have to redo my WordPress tutorial (again!) as soon as WordPress 2.7 gets released in full (sigh).

Read more about 2.7 here:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/whats-your-favorite-thing-about-the-27-beta/

WordPress version 2.5 has received a lot of press around the blogosphere, not always very positive.

However, I’ve just upgraded this blog to 2.5 and it seems to have gone very smoothly. All my posts and pages survived and I have successfully reactivated all my plugins. So far so good.

As you can see, I’ve made the start of this post red(!) which is one of the new features in the Visual tab. But another welcome addition is the ability to add media files.

You can now easily add video, audio and other media to your posts and pages.  And your videos don’t have to be played via Youtube (although you can if you want) – you can upload a video to WordPress and embed it into a post or page. I’ve played around with this and it works fine.

WordPress is, basically, a very basic blogging system.

To create a successful blog there is no need to get complicated. Some of the most powerful and popular WordPress blogs have very few bells and whistles. These simple, basic blogs have maybe four or five static pages which provide the background to what the blog is all about, and maybe why the blogger blogs. Then they have the posts which broadcast to the world what the blogger has to say. The blogger posts regularly, has built up a loyal and expanding readership who provide an interesting stream of comments, and that’s about that. There will be few (or no) extras or ads or distracting links away from the blog.

But what if you do want to have a more complicated blog? What if you want to take advantage of all the add-ons and graphics and interactive goo-gaws that characterize the phenomenon loosely known as Web 2.0?

Well, this is basic WordPress’s strength. If you want, you can have a very robust, basic blog but you can bolt on a huge array of add-ons known as themes, widgets and plugins which slot into the WordPress engine to provide a very powerful and distinctive web presence. Each blogger can choose their particular combination of add-ons to make their blog unique.

With WordPress you can be as simple or as sophisticated as you want!