With WordPress 2.5 to be scheduled to be released today (I’m not sure if it will make it today or not) the whole blogosphere is going to go crazy with reviews of the latest version of WordPress. Many users would invariably encounter problems while upgrading, so here’s a check list by Lorelle Van Fossen to make sure that the upgrading to WordPress 2.5 goes off smoothly.

Let me cut out all the stuff and just list out the points here for a quick scan. You can read the full list over here.

• Check Plugin and Theme Compatibilities
• Update Themes and Plugins
• Do a PreFlight Test
• Disable and/or Remove Old Plugins
• Backup your Database
• Relax and Read (The finer print is what matters)

Whether WordPress 2.5 will be released today or not is still unknown. According to the chatter on the mailing list it looks like it still isn’t ready yet. Matt apparently mentioned a beta2 but the latest SVN tag mentions beta1 so I’m not sure if we will see WordPress 2.5 today.

In my opinion Matt and co is better off by delaying the release than to ship a buggy one. I won’t be upgrading to WordPress 2.5 for atleast two weeks as the new UI just doesn’t cut if for me. I feel that the latest UI is a step backwards in Admin design, but anyways that’s just my opinion.

I’m also testing out Habari at the moment, and I will publish my thoughts on it soon, so stay tuned for that. What are your plans for WordPress 2.5? Do you plan to upgrade as soon as it comes out or play the waiting game and upgrade later?

If you are a WordPress.com blogger, then you have many reasons to rejoice this festive season, and the feeds on WordPress.com have received a major upgrade. And Ofcourse that latest addition from Automattic is Enhanced Feeds that has for long been associated with Feedburner. Read on to find out what these Enhanced Feeds really are,

Up until now your feed has been fairly basic. All you got in most aggregators was the post title and the content. Simple to navigate and read, but it left you with so many questions. How do I add this post to del.icio.us? How do I Digg it and has it been Dugg already? I wonder how many comments have been left?

Wonder no longer. Today, your WordPress.com feed can be supercharged with the following fine feed widgets:

1. Comment Count
2. Categories
3. Tags
4. “Add to Del.icio.us” link
5. “Digg it!” link
6. “Stumble it!” link

Comment Count is turned on by default but you can switch all the features on or off as you please.

This is a great addition to WordPress.com for sure, as there are loads of Bloggers on WordPress who’ll benefit from this addition. Hopefully this new feature will increase the interaction with the feeds on WordPress… Have a look at the WordPress.com blog for more details.

If you haven’t noticed here are some changes to Gravatar in the past few days since the acquisition :

• Automattic transferred the Rails application and most of the avatar serving to WordPress.com infrastructure and servers.
• Avatar serving is now more than three times as fast, and works every time.
• All the Premium Services like Multiple email id’s and avatars are now free. Everyone who paid for a premium account in the past 60 days will be refunded.

Well things are moving pretty fast at Automattic and Gravatar and the current focus seems to be on getting the Gravatar’s to load extremely fast and improve the performance of the site. Well Matt has chalked out even the future plans for Gravatar and here they are quoted from the announcement he wrote :

• Move the gravatar serving to a Content Delivery Network so not only will they be fast, it’ll be low latency and not slow down a page load.
• Take the million or so avatars we have on WordPress.com and make them available through the Gravatar API, to compliment the 115k already here.
• From Gravatar, integrate them into all WordPress.com templates and bring features like multiple avatars over.
• From WordPress.com, bring the bigger sizes (128px) over and make that available for any Gravatar. Currently Gravatars are only available up to 80px.
• Allow Gravatar profile pages with Microformat support for things like XFN rel="me" and hCard.
• Develop a new API that has cleaner URLs and allows Gravatars to be addressed by things like URL in addition to (or instead of) email addresses.
• Rewrite the application itself (site.gravatar.com) to fit directly into our WordPress.com grid, for internet-scale performance and reliability.

Its nice to Open source world growing bigger and better. I would like to see what Matt and team can come up with for Gravatar, because it happens to be an extremely popular service and hopefully they won’t mess with it. Drop in your thoughts on this acquisition. Was it a good or a bad move by Automattic?

I went searching around the internet, and found the solution that I was looking for and here the steps that I took to be able to post tags from Windows Live Writer.

First of all, if you are on a self hosted WordPress Blog, download wlwmanifest.xml from WordPress Trac. This patch somehow didn’t make it into the 2.3 Release, so hopefully it will in WordPress 2.3.1. Once you have downloaded the zip, extract the folder and upload it to the root folder of your blog, i.e. the place where the wp-config.php resides.

Well once you have done that, the difficult thing is that you need to make Live Writer trust you that your blog allows tags. Well there is a registry hack that does this, but I would rather keep it simple so here is standalone executable, that will enable tags on your Live Writer blogs on a per blog basis.

Once you have done all of the steps stated steps, you are now one step away from Taxonomy glory in Live Writer. By default you can’t see the Tags pane, so you need to manually activate it. Well here are the steps that you need to follow.

• Locate the Toolbar below the editor and click on the arrow that is pointing upwards.

• Now you should see the Keywords entry. This is where you should enter all your tags.

If you see something similar to the screenshots above, then get yourself a nice cup of coffee, because you have done a nice job. So the next time you post something on your blog make sure you add some tags to it. .

After doing that, the result was satisfactory enough and you can see the new Tag Cloud that runs on the Tag System of WordPress 2.3 Over at my Archives page. Well if you are planning to upgrade over to WordPress 2.3 anytime soon, then here are some tips that I would like to give, to make your updating process a lot more easier.

• Make a Full Backup of Everything, i.e. your WordPress Folder and the Complete Database.
• Store it in some secure location, so that you can revert back to the old version, in case anything goes wrong.
• Check out the Plugin Compatibility List, and see if the Plugins that are very important to your Blog are listed as compatible.

• Disable all the Active Plugins.
• Once you have done all that, Get the latest build of WP 2.3 and Replace all the existing files on your Server.
• Delete the Plugins that you don’t need.
• Upgrade the blog and see if everything is working fine. Get the Latest version of all the plugins you need beforehand so that you can save time, in getting the blog to run in perfect state.
• Activate all the plugins one by one, and check that nothing breaks.
• Once everything seems to be ok, backup your blog completely once again and keep it in a safe location.

If you are using any of these popular plugins, then I suggest you go through this, to see some of the fixes, new versions, mods etc.. of the plugin that you love.

• Extended Live Archives : Here is the Fix
• Google Sitemap Generator : New Version
• Related Posts : Alternative Plugin

I plan to release the plugin that I coded up for WordPress 2.3 to display colored tag clouds in a couple of days. If you want to test out the beta, then contact me. Please let me know, how your WordPress Upgrade goes about?

• Disable WordPress Core Update

Completely disables the core update checking system which is a new feature in WordPress 2.3. The plugin prevents WordPress from checking for updates, and prevents any notifications from being displayed in the admin area. Ideal for administrators of multiple WordPress installations.

• Disable WordPress Plugin Updates

Completely disables the plugin update checking system which is a new feature in WordPress 2.3. The plugin prevents WordPress from checking for updates, and prevents any notifications from being displayed on the Plugins page. Ideal for administrators of multiple WordPress installations.

If you use the plugins for Wrdpress, then I suggest you manually update your WordPress Installation and Plugins everytime a new update comes out, because they include a lot of security fixes and new features.

Via Quick Online Tips

Here is a rundown into what WordPress 2.3 Has to offer :

• Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
• Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.

• We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
• A new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
• There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

If you are looking for instructions on how to upgrade WordPress, then head over to this page or I suggest you read this page that highlights how can you Upgrade WordPress the Failsafe way.

Through its Interface you will be able to post :

• Text
• Pictures
• Sound (mp3)
• Video (flv)
• Webcam streaming (directly from AirPress!!)
• Webcam snapshot
• Flash animation (alpha version)

Here are some screenshots of AirPress in action :

So if you are impressed by AirPress and are a blogging freak, then I suggest you try out AirPress. On a sidenote I posted this post straight from AirPress. Though it took me more time, than Live Writer would normally take, but all in all I was awed by this wonderful App.

Try Out AirPress today. Note : You Need the Adobe Runtime Environment to be installed before you can use AirPress. 

Well here they are :

• The Twitter Updater

The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post. You can specify the text for the updates, and also have the option to turn the auto update on/off for the different post actions in the admin panel.

• Twitter Sharts

‘Shart’ your twitter status anywhere within your wordpress blog posts or pages!

• Twitter Tools

The most popular plugin to integrate twitter completely within your blog. It features a lot of advanced features like archiving of tweets, creating daily digests, updating twitter and lots more. This is the most comprehensive plugin you can have to integrate twitter with your wordpress blog.


• SimpleTwitter

SimpleTwitter is a plug-in for WordPress which enables WordPress blog owners to easily add Twitter messages to their templates.

• Twitter Feed

Post new posts from your blog automatically from your blog to twitter. this is a nice and effective way to share your blog posts with your friends.

• Twitter Badge

The Official Twitter badges that you can display on just about any site not just wordpress blogs. You can choose from a variety of colors and display it on your blog.

• Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget

A more customized version of the Official Twitter badges that allows to choose the number of updates, match the theme that you are using, and a host of other options for customization.

• TwitThis

TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.

• Twitt-Twoo

Twitt-Twoo is a simple little plugin that will allow you to update your Twitter status right from your blog’s sidebar. AJAX takes cares of the hard work, and means that your page doens’t even have to reload, allowing for quick and easy status updates.

• RSS to Twitter

A Simple and effective way to publish your blog posts as twitter updates. Not really drag drop and use but it really is simple to use.

Hope these addons will help you to integrate Twitter and your blog better. If you know of any other addon that I can add to this list, then please let me know in the comments.

• Get Rid of the Clutter

As I mentioned before there are far too many items in the compose screen that I normally don’t use. There is stuff like Password Protection, Excerpt, Custom Fields, Discussion Options, Bookmarklets, Author controls etc.. which I am sure majority of WordPress Users don’t really use. So if you are one of them go ahead and add Clutter Free to your ever growing list of wordpress plugins.

Once you have activated Clutter Free you need to go the Users Sections and deselect all the options that you don’t need at the writing screen. Save the settings and Boom! as Steve Jobs would say your Compose screen now loads a tad faster.

• Disable the Rich Text Editor

When it comes to the Rich Text Editor things are definitely easy for the average to publish a new post. But in case you are a power user like me then you would want to Disable the Rich Text Editor Screen that has some stupid bugs. You can’t easily the embed codes which sites like Youtube etc… provide. It also happens to be slow while loading so you could be losing a lot of time waiting for things to load. After all Time is Money.

I would put my money on the Simple Text Editor that is extremely powerful in terms of what it can do. To disable the Rich Text Editor follow these steps. Go to the Users Section in your admin. Scroll to the bottom and uncheck the option that Says “Use the visual rich editor when writing”. The only Downside is that you will have to learn some basic HTML before you can use the Rich Text Editor.

• Make QuickTags Smarter

If you are long time WordPress user you will know how useful Quicktags really are. Just about anything is possible with Quicktags. The default WordPress install comes with a few quick tags like <strong>, <li>, <ul> etc.. But you might want to add a few more tags to this list so that you don’t have to repeatedly add those tags again while you are creating your post. I have some more tags in my Write screen like <span> which i regularly use.

If all the talk above sounded a little too geekish for you. Here is the simplified version of what you have to do. Just download the WP-AddQuickTag plugin and install it. Select Add Quicktags under the options menu and add the all the tags that you wish to include. And ofcourse you need to have the Rich Text Editor disabled to make Quicktags work for you.

• Install Greasemonkey

If you are a Firefox User you definately should install Greasemonkey and also install the following Userscripts that can improve your Workflow.

Akismet Auntie Spam

Reskins the Akismet spambox page for WordPress admins. Download all spam at once, compress spam to make it more scanable and completely compresses obvious spam. Turns checking spam into a 10 minute per week activity.

Inline MP3 Player

Adds an inline WordPress mp3 with Play and Pause controls to every link to an mp3 file.

• Install WP-Admin Tiger 3.0

The default layout of the WordPress Admin can be confusing at times. It shows all signs of being extremely cluttered. You have to click through a maze of buttons to do something, and the most important thing surely is that it is not really good to look at. Incase you are one of those who have got bored of the default layout for WordPress Admin then its time for you to download WP-Admin Tiger 3 that completely changes the look and feel of the WordPress admin.