If you are feeling brave, Wordpress 2.7 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download by the general public. As many of you are aware 2.7 features a redesign of the backend user interface.
I have been following the progress of this project on an almost nightly basis and it’s pretty nice. I am not going to roll it out to my clients until it goes stable but I think it’s safe to try on any sandbox installations you might have running. Here’s a note from the Wordpress blogs:
With the release of RC1, we’re in the final leg of development before the release of 2.7. 280 commits since beta 3 have polished the new admin UI (including new menu icons created by the winners of our icon design contest) and fixed all known blocker bugs.
We think RC1 is ready for everyone to try out. Please download RC1 and help us make the final release the best it can be. As always, back up your blog before upgrading. Get RC1.
WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1
Just so no one else out there thinks that they have lost their mind, there was never a wordpress 2.6.4, instead there was a bogus version of wordpress floating around that wasn’t legit so the guys at AutoMattic in an effort to stay ahead of the folks issuing 2.6.4 have opted to skip that version and go directly to 2.6.5.
Wordpress 2.6.5 is a pretty important update in that it fixes a small hole that could possibly be exploited via XSS. I have been updating our hosting wordpress solutions this morning and should have all of our clients updated in the next 20 minutes or so.
WordPress 2.6.5 is immediately available and fixes one security problem and three bugs. We recommend everyone upgrade to this release.
The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.
2.6.5 contains three other small fixes in addition to the XSS fix. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision. The second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types. The third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests. For a list of changed files, consult the full changeset between 2.6.3 and 2.6.5.
Note that we are skipping version 2.6.4 and jumping from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds. There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.
WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6.5
Turning off comments globally in Wordpress is kind of a community frustration among developers, we get requests from time to time from our clients that are running Wordpress that are wanting to globally disable comments.
Honestly there really isn’t a good way to approach this, in a nutshell, this has to be handled on a post by post basis also page by page if you are running comments on your pages as well.
In the back of my mind I knew in theory what had to happen to globally remove the comments.php include from showing up on the site but wordpresshacker.com did a great job posting the 3 steps involved that I decided to re-post them here…
- Open up index.php and remove this line of code:
<span class=”add_comment”><?php comments_popup_link(’? No Comments’, ‘? 1 Comment’, ‘? % Comments’); ?></span>
- Open up single.php and remove this line of code:
<?php comments_template(); ?>
- Open up archive.php and remove this line of code:
<?php comments_popup_link(’No Comments’, ‘1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’); ?>
That’s it, you’re done, unless you have another theme that you’re using, in which case you need to scan all your blog pages for anything related to comments. If you find something, open whatever template that page is using and remove any lines of code like what’s above.
Turn Off Wordpress Comments | Wordpress Hacker
I have been holding off on diving into WP 2.7 for a little while until the community hashes through all of the bugs, etc.
For those of you early adopters out there that do have it running with Beta 1, you may want to update to Beta 2.
Here’s a list of the fixes addressed in Beta 2:
- The Upload button didn’t always show. Fixed.
- JS on the Dashboard broke for blogs with no comments, causing several UI elements to “freeze”. Fixed.
- Recent Drafts Dashboard module didn’t show correct times. Fixed.
- Various Autosave fixes.
- Redirect after deleting a page from the editor went back to the deleted page. Fixed.
- Fixed loading of translations for default TinyMCE plugins.
- Added avatars to the edit users list.
- Added some missing translations.
- Fixed some validation errors.
- Fixed some PHP warnings and notices.
- Handle inconsistent file permissions during auto upgrade
- Change Publish box layout to better accommodate internationalized text
- Fix quick editing of the last page in the Edit Pages list
- Fix Screen Options for IE
- Fixes for choose tag from tag cloud
- Rewrite rules fixes for certain hosts
- Don’t check for updates on every page load
- Easier post box dropping
- Preview fixes
- RTL fixes
- Fixed broken wp-mail
- Plugin update and install fixes
- First draft of contextual help tab
If you have already installed beta 1, you can update to beta 2 via the Tools -> Update menu. Beta 1 does have a bug in the automatic upgrade that breaks certain setups, so be prepared to download and install Beta 2 manually if you experience problems. Get 2.7 Beta 2.
WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.7 Beta 2
Brian Gardner has been my favorite WordPress Theme developer for a while now. His themes in conjunction with Jason Schuller plugins are by far the new standard in my opinion.
I typically use Brian’s themes as a starter shell for my projects and usually hack the CSS and images to make the finished product look however I want. I have to admit that working with Brian’s themes has helped me become a lot more familiar with CSS also, which was something I was needing to do to break some of my old school habits.
A few months ago I purchased Brian’s complete theme package for Developers, this was an awesome investment and I think we have already seen a pretty good return on our investment from that purchase but what Brian did next kind of threw me a curveball, but I think I understand it now. Basically Brian has retired the themes that I purchased from him, they are no longer available to the general public, but I have them, which is good. By retiring the Revolution One themes, he has launched Revolution Two, in conjunction with some other Wordpress Developers and they have made their themes open source. That’s right, open source as in free.
These themes on the Revolution Two site are all free for download but if you want support for these themes you can purchase packages from the team to support you in your projects. Which if you think about it is an awesome idea. I haven’t been very active in the Revolution theme community very long but I plan on spending a lot more time in there in the very near future. The few times I have posted questions regarding support issues on the Featured content plugin I have gotten an almost immediate response back. If you haven’t already you can go to: www.revolutiontheme.com and be redirected to the new website w/ the new themes.
Revolution Two WordPress Themes
I was reading this morning on the WordPress blog that the beta version of 2.7 is now available for testing. Right now it has some browser issues w/ IE and Opera but they are working to get those smoothed out. I also noticed that the projected release date for 2.7 has been bumped back about 2 weeks.
For those of you that might be wondering, version 2.7 is going to have a visual redesign on the backend that we have been looking forward to for a while. Here’s an excerpt from Ryan Boren on the WordPress Blog:
The first public beta of WordPress 2.7 is here at last. Join the thousands of people already testing 2.7 by downloading 2.7 Beta 1. As previously mentioned on this blog, 2.7 is bringing a new visual design. This design is almost completely implemented, but there are still a few areas that aren’t quite finished in Beta 1. There are also several glitches in certain browsers. Beta 1 provides the best experience in Firefox and Safari. Don’t worry, we are working on IE and Opera and will have those looking good in time for the final release.
Speaking of the final release, it will not be available on November 10th as originally scheduled. We are two weeks behind schedule at the moment. We need a little more time to finish the visual design, do a round of user testing against that finished design, and do a proper round of public beta testing. Our plan is to keep working as if Nov. 10 is still the release date. However, instead of releasing the final 2.7 on the 10th, we will make a release candidate available instead. The release candidate is intended to be a high-quality, almost-finished release that we are comfortable recommending for broad use. After Nov. 10, the focus will be on fixing high impact bugs turned up by those of you testing the release candidate. I suspect 2.7 will be ready for final release by the end of November. A specific date will be set as we progress through the public beta cycle and get a feel for how solid the release is.
WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.7 Beta 1
I have been in the process of updating my church’s website over the past few weeks to incorporate some new features and plugins that we were needing.
For the redesign I started w/ one of Brian Gardner’s premium themes and customized it quite a bit to include the featured gallery plugin on the home page as well as the new Facebook Connect application that allows users to comment on the church website using their Facebook accounts. You can click here to visit the website or click on the screenshot below.
This is the second church website that I have built on the Wordpress CMS but I would love to open up that market for a couple of reasons. One reason is that Wordpress lends itself well to the needs of most churches today. If you have a church website project that you would like for us to look at, please feel free to contact us.
