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/

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.

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!

‘WordPress.com is a WordPress-powered weblog hosting provider which opened to beta testers on August 8, 2005 and opened to the public on November 21, 2005. It runs WordPress MU, a version of the original software that allows people to create and manage their own weblogs without requiring the time, money and technical knowledge involved in setting up WordPress on an ordinary hosting account. It is financially supported via the use of Google Adsense banners and paid upgrades.

The site was initially launched as an invitation-only service, although at one stage, accounts were also available to users of the Flock web browser^[1]. However, accounts can now be registered by anyone, and there are over 2,491,431 individual blogs with the service^[2]. Registration is not required to read or comment on weblogs hosted on the site, except if the blog owner wanted to do so; but registration is required to own or post in a weblog. All the basic and original features (current as of May 2006) of the site are free-to-use, and will remain so in future. However, some features (such as a CSS editor, domain mapping, and storage upgrades) are available only to users who pay for them^[3]‘

If you were coming to blogging fresh and inexperienced this definition would be as clear as mud. And this is the problem: WordPress blogging is so immersed in incomprehensible jargon that a newbie balks at the first hurdle.

So let’s do what the marketers tell us to do: point out the benefits, NOT the features.

What are the benefits? It’s quite simple.

• WordPress lets you create a free, robust, flexible web presence without the need to know any webpage coding language.
• WordPress is a WYSIWYG blogging system that lets you create web pages quickly, easily and as often as you like
• WordPress is respected as the premier blogging platform on the Internet.

That’s it. That’s what WordPress is.