Client Newsletter: July 2010

As most of you have probably noticed in your Admin panels, Wordpress 3.0 has been released for about 2 weeks now and you may be wondering about upgrading.

Networks and Communities

The biggest and most exiting change is the merger of Wordpress with Wordpress MU. This simply means that now Wordpress Admins can create website or blog networks running on one installation, on your root domain or domain of your choice. Just like it’s  done on Wordpress.com, and other blogging platforms and networks.

This probably isn’t a big concern for most of you since many of your Wordpress sites are meant as a company site, but it can be beneficial throughout your growth should you want to add additional websites and blogs to cover different aspects of your business, employee blogs, or offer paid or free blogs to your community.

You can see a working example of a new project I am working on here: New York Blogs

Setting up your Wordpress 3.0 installation to act as a blog network does require some configuration changes and has other Administration concerns that should be considered before jumping right in including:  Hosting, Security,  Licensing Designs,, and many others. Contact me with any questions.

Other notable additions to the software include:

• WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
• New default theme “Twenty Ten” takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress.
• New Custom Menu Management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
• Custom Header and Custom Background APIs.
• Contextual help text accessed under the Help tab of every screen in the WordPress administration.
• Ability to set the admin username and password during installation.
• Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the process.
• Support for Shortlinks.
• Improved Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support. (Try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities.)
• A lighter admin color scheme to increase accessibility and put the focus more squarely on your content.

You can see a full list of new additions  here. http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0

Plug Ins:

Additionally you have probably noticed that many of your plug ins have been upgraded to match the new version of Wordpress.  If I did your installation and set up, you most likely have your one click automatic upgrade set and can follow the prompts to update your own plug ins.

If you need help, I am more than happy to assist as a courtesy.

Themes:

Here is the sticky part about upgrading. There are some themes that may not be compatible with the latest version and upgrading may cause them to break. If you have concerns and aren’t sure, but would like to upgrade to the latest version, drop me a line and I will check to see if everything in your installation is compatible.

It is important that you stay up to date with all current versions as much as possible. Besides additional features, there are also security updates and patches as well.

The world won’t come to an end if you don’t update right away. Particularly if it means (although rare) that you will have to change to a compatible  design to do so. But you will have to update eventually.

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful, yet safe week end.