Yellow Swordfish

Releases

WordPress releases are named after well known jazz musicians. WordPress 1.2 was codenamed Mingus (after Charles Mingus).

WordPress 1.5 was released mid-February 2005 and codenamed Strayhorn. It added a range of new vital features. One such is being able to manage static pages. This allows content pages to be created and managed outside the normal blog chronology and has been the first step away from being simple blog management software to becoming a full content management system. Another is the new template/theme system, which allows users to easily activate and deactivate “skins” for their sites. WordPress was also equipped with a new default template (codenamed Kubrick[3]) designed by Michael Heilemann.

WordPress 2.0 was released in December 2005 and codenamed Duke. This version added rich editing, better administration tools, image uploading, faster posting, an improved import system, and completely overhauled the back end. WordPress 2.0 also offered various improvements to plugin developers.[4]

On 22 January 2007, another major upgrade, WordPress 2.1, codenamed Ella, was released. In addition to correcting security issues, version 2.1 featured a redesigned interface and enhanced editing tools (including integrated spell check and auto save), improved content management options, and a variety of code and database optimizations.

WordPress 2.2, codenamed Getz, was released on 16 May 2007. Version 2.2 featured widget support for templates, updated Atom feed support, and speed optimizations.[5] Wordpress 2.2 was initially slated to have a revised taxonomy system for categories, as well as tags, but a proposed revision led to the feature being held back from release.[6]

WordPress 2.3, codenamed Dexter, was released 24 September 2007. Version 2.3 features native tagging support, new taxonomy system for categories, easy notification of updates as well as other interface improvements. 2.3 also fully supports Atom 1.0 along with the publishing protocol. WordPress 2.3 also includes some much needed security fixes.[7]

History

b2\cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog was the precursor to WordPress. b2\cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2000 blogs as of May 2003. It was also written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress. Though WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2.[1]

In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package was changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress – causing a marked, and continuing, growth in WordPress’s popularity.[2]

Features

* What You See Is What You Get post editor
* Templating system
* Integrated link management
* Search engine-friendly permalink structure
* Extensible plugin support
* Nested categories and multiple categories for articles
* TrackBack and Pingback
* Typographic filters for proper formatting and styling of text
* Static Pages
* Multiple Authors
* Can store a list of users that visit your blog
* Can block a person’s IP address
* Tag support

Creating and Managing a Blogroll

Blogroll 

The blogroll is where you link to the blogs you read frequently - a friendly way of acknowledging the good blogs out there. WordPress’ built-in Links Manager allows you to add and manage links effortlessly

Bookmarklet 

The effortlessness begins with a neat bookmarklet that you can add to the bookmarks or favourites in your browser. Adding a link to an interesting blog or website is as simple as clicking on the bookmark or favourite when you visit the blog or website the next time!

Categorizing 

The links in your blogroll can be categorized and neatly organized

Importing 

If you already have a list o’ links as an OPML file, you can import it to your WordPress blog. For those coming from other blogging tools, this means that you can import your blogroll from Blogrolling.com and never use a third-party service to manage your blogroll, again.

Exporting 

Did we say you can also export an OPML file with your list o’ links?

Displaying 

As with everything else, you get some neat template tags that enable you to display your blogroll the way you like - in alphabetical order, ranking order, the order in which they were updated - you get the idea

Discussion and Comments

Community Building
WP is not the YMCA, but it does help build communities around weblogs, through the use of comments, trackbacks and pingbacks, helping you keep in touch with the audience and fostering friendship
Allowed html tags
Not everyone is evil, but keep those who are in check by limiting which html tags are kosher on your weblog. The default html tags allowed by WordPress are a sane choice to let people use html in their comments, without compromising the safety of your data or server.
Moderation
For the control freak in all of us, WordPress provides an array of moderation options. You can moderate

* all comments before they appear on the blog
* comments with specific words in them
* comments posted from specific IP addresses
* comments containing more than some specified number of links.

All these moderation options keep spammers and vandals in check.
Notification
WordPress can keep you in the loop by sending you an email each time there is a new comment or a comment awaiting moderation.

Archives and Search

Archiving
After you’ve been blogging for an extended period of time, what matters is how well your posts are organized, and for that, WordPress provides you with several ready made options to display the archives of your blog, containing all the old posts. You can choose from yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, category-wise or author-wise archives, and easily link to the archive pages from the main page (or any other page) of your blog, using a template tag to generate the links to these archive pages. Since WordPress generates pages dynamically, all these archive pages come at no additional space-cost to your server.

Searching
WordPress has a functional built-in search tool, which allows visitors to your blog to search for terms they are interested in, and the search-hilite plugin that ships with WordPress can highlight their search terms, so it is even easier for them to find what they were searching for. In addition to this, the plugin also does the same for someone who arrives at your blog by clicking at a search result in a search engine, such as google. All in all, searching is fun, with WordPress.

Creating Content

Password protection
So you want to share something with some people, but not everyone? Easy, protect the article in question with a password.

Post Slug
If you are using clean PermaLinks on your website, you can define the link to an individual post by using a post-slug.

Post to the future
You can write a post today and have it appear on the weblog at a future date, automatically.

Multi paged posts
If your post is too long, cut it up into pages, so your readers don’t have to scroll to the end of the world.

File/picture uploading
You can upload pictures or files, and link to them or display them in your articles. You have the option of creating thumbnails of pictures when you upload them.

Categories
Organize your posts into categories, and sub-categories, and sub-sub categories…

Emoticons
WordPress is smart enough to convert character smileys, like “:)” into the graphical image counterparts.

Save Drafts
Save your unfinished articles, improve them later, publish when you’re done.

Previewing Posts
Before you press the “Publish” button, you can look at the preview for the article you just wrote to check if everything is the way you want it. In fact, you can do that at any time, since the preview is “live”.

Desktop Tools
You don’t have to use a browser to update your weblog, you can use any desktop blogging tool that supports the MetaWeblog or Blogger API.

Blog by email
You can send your posts as an email and have them appear on the weblog.

Bookmarklets
Add the “Press It!” bookmarklet provided by WordPress to your browser and you have a shortcut to create an article with a link to the page currently displayed on your browser!

Sidebar
If you don’t like a bookmarklet, use our friendly browser sidebar, which can be used in a similar fashion.

Formatting
Think of WordPress as something that makes your words smoother, and your pages more appealing. WordPress ships with text-formatting plugins that clean up your content and add typographic goodness to your articles.

Customizing the Design

Template Driven Design
WordPress uses templates to generate the pages dynamically. You can control the presentation of content by editing the templates using the Template Editor tool and the Template Tags

Template and File Editor
Every installation of WordPress comes with a file editor you can use to edit your templates and other WordPress related files, right in your browser without having to worry about downloading and uploading the files in order to edit them.

Template Tags
Template tags make it easier to design the content and information displayed on your weblog. You don’t need to be a PHP whiz to design your weblog.

Themes
You can skin your weblog using readily available themes, or styles. You can also create and share your own themes.

Plugins
Plugins extend the core functionality of your weblog. A large number of user-developed plugins are already available and can be used to do virtually anything you want to, with your blog.

Publicizing Your Work

Feeds
The RSS 1.0 (aka RDF), RSS 2.0 and ATOM specifications are fully supported by WordPress, and what’s more, just about any page on your weblog has an associated feed that your readers can subscribe to - there’s a feed for the latest posts, for categories, comments, well, like we said earlier, for anything you want. The more options your readers have to keep track of different sections of your weblog, the easier it is for you to spread the word around the world. WordPress also fully supports RSS 2.0 with enclosures, so adding mp3 files (such as podcasts) to your RSS feeds is a snap.

Cruft-free Permalinks
The URLs for all the pages in your weblog can be made to conform to a standard, cruft-free system, and all the links are structured, sensible, and understable to human and machines, and that includes search engines. Clean URLs are essential for search engine optimization and an improved user experience.

Inter-blog Communication
In an increasingly connected world, WordPress comes ready for PingBack and TrackBack, two very useful ways of connecting to other weblogs, and to enable them to do the same.

Managing and Administering the Weblog

Locally Installed 

WordPress is designed to be installed on your own web server, or shared hosting account, which gives you complete control over the weblog. Unlike third-party hosted services, you can be sure of being able to access and modify everything related to your weblog, in case you need to. This also means that you can install WordPress on your desktop or home computer, or even on an Intranet.

Portable Core 

You can choose to have the tree of wordpress related files, which form the back-end of your publicly displayed weblog, be in the same directory as the weblog or in a different directory. For example, if you want your weblog at http://example.com (public_html - the public “root” of your webserver or hosting account) and you want to store the wordpress related files and directory tree in http://example.com/wordpress (public_html/wordpress), you can!

UTC friendly 

WordPress allows you to define your time as an offset from Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), so that all the time-related elements stored in the database are stored as GMT values, which is a universal standard. Among other things, this helps you display the correct time on your weblog, even if your host server is located in a different time zone.

gzip enabled 

You can save some bandwidth by turning on the gzip option in your WordPress install. WordPress gzips content when the readers’ browser supports it. This requires the mod_gzip module to be enabled in your Apache server installation.

User management 

WordPress uses user-levels to control user-access to different features, so you can restrict the ability of individual users to create or modify content in your weblog, by changing their user-level.

User profiles 

Each user on your weblog can define a profile, with details such as their email address, instant messaging aliases etc, if they want to. Users can also control the way in which their details are displayed on the weblog.

Easy installation and upgrade 

WordPress’ famous 5 minute install can’t be beaten for simplicity and ease of use. Upgrading your weblog to the latest version of WordPress is easy, too, and it should take less time than the installation!

Dynamic page generation 

No rebuilding of all your pages each time you update your weblog, or any aspect of it. All pages are generated using the database and the templates each time a page from your weblog is requested by a viewer. This means that updating your weblog, or its design is as fast as possible, and required server storage space usage is minimal.

Internationalization and Localization 

You can now create a weblog that is localized to your choice, and delivered in a language of your choice. The gettext method is used to translate and localize WordPress to the fullest extent.

The Tame Leopard

Having waited for at least the first update from Apple to arrive, I finally bought Leopard (OS/X 10.5) and have now installed it onto my iMac. Now as anyone who may have passed this way over the last two and half years will know - I am a big fan of Macs and OS/X and would never be able to go back to Windows. But I am also a vocal critic of Apple and the things they get wrong. And the biggest thing they get wrong as far as I am concerned is the arrogant certainty with which they always tell you - ‘things just work’. They invariably don’t of course.

It’s the little things that would fluster the non-Mac literate and get them searching the Apple support website - except of course that they wouldn’t be able to because Leopard totally failed to find my Apple Airport WiFi Base Station and even when it finally did it failed to notice that there was actually a fast and juicy internet connection throbbing through it. To find that meant setting up the base station again except, of course, that the Airport Utility couldn’t find it for a long while. I lost count of the reboots.

The other problem is that when you finally do get connected up and can visit the Apple support pages for a little help with this and that, actually finding anything useful is a bit like finding a decent turkey in the local supermarkets late on Christmas Eve. Sure, you can find hints and a forum full of others going on and on about how things ‘just don’t work’ but when you do find what you need you’re back up against that wall. ‘Just do this, this and that and everything will be fine’. But it never bloody well is fine. The Apple attempt to make everything simple to setup and use and their zealous belief that they have done just that is the one thing that drives me to despair. If you need software help with anything Apple the last people to look to are Apple themselves.

Other than that - Leopard is….. pretty. But I really wanted to take advantage of Time Machine hence the upgrade.

Now here’s something else that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere - although unlike real Mac fan-boys I don’t actually read every word published so it probably has been. My first upgrade was from Jaguar to Panther. Jaguar, I recall, had a few games that weren’t that bad. Panther came bundled with a pre-licensed copy of the wonderful ‘Art Directors Toolkit’. Tiger came bundled with some more simple games and a pre-licensed copy of ‘Comic Life’. Leopard comes bundled with… er… nothing. Not even promotional 30 day tryouts of Pages! This is not a complaint as such, just an observation that surprised me.