WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 is available for download now and I’ve been testing out some of the new features. In this post I’ll demonstrate the new “stick this post” feature in WordPress 2.7.
WordPress has a great community of people who contribute themes and plugins for other users to download and use for free on their blogs. Often these plugins are written to add functionality to WordPress that is in high demand but is not provided by the core software. Occassionally this means a popular plugin function is incorporated into the WordPress code, such as Tags in version 2.5.
There are some plugins available for WordPress (such as WP-Sticky) that add the ability to “stick” a post to the top of the blog so that it appears above newer posts. This is useful for blogs who want to keep an important announcement at the top of their blog and not have it pushed further down the screen by newer short posts.
WordPress 2.7 now includes this functionality with a check box in the publishing section of the visual editor.
By checking this box you nominate that post to be shown at the top of your blog regardless of whether newer posts have been published. If more than one sticky post has been published they will appear in order of newest to oldest, and they will all appear above non-stickied posts. This means if you eventually want a sticky post to no longer appear at the top of your blog you will need to edit the post and clear the check box.
WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 is available for download now and I’ve been testing out some of the new features. In this post I’ll demonstrate the subtle but useful changes to the time and date settings in WordPress 2.7.
In WordPress 2.6 the time and date settings look like this.
In WordPress 2.7 the time and date settings now look like this.
The Date Format and Time Format settings now make several common formatting options selectable, while still keeping the option to choose a custom format. This is much easier than having to refer to the formatting documentation when choosing a format, especially as most people would use one of the new selectable ones anyway.
WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 is available for download now and I’ve been testing out some of the new features. In this post I’ll discuss the new dashboard features revealed by Beta 2.
1. QuickPress
QuickPress appears in the top right of the new dashboard and is a new way to fire off a quick blog post with just basic text, images and tags without having to load the full WordPress visual editor. If you need access to formatting or plugin features you can use QuickPress to save a draft post and then edit it later in the full visual editor. This is great for short “newsy” posts or bloggers who frequently need to just copy/paste a draft blog post from another writing application that they plan to edit and improve later.
2. Recent Drafts
Just below QuickPress is the Recent Drafts section. For bloggers that like to draft posts and come back to them later before publishing this is a much faster way of jumping in to the visual editor for a draft post compared to the old method of navigation.
3. Recent Comments
Access to recent comments is provided for quick comment moderation. Depending on their comments policy this may be good for small blogs with few comments but more popular blogs with hundreds of comments per post might find it to be no help with their comment burden.
4. Plugins
A new plugins view has been added to the dashboard. It will display information about new and popular plugins and might help some bloggers find out about new plugins that interest them. Each plugin listed has an install link next to it that launches a lightbox window of the plugin page from the WordPress Codex and gives you the opportunity to install it to your blog.
5. Sidebar
One of the most visible changes to the new WordPress 2.7 admin interface is the relocation of menu items from the top of the page to the side of the page. This new sidebar is visible in all of the administrative pages and contains expandable sections so that you can keep your most commonly used features exposed and collapse other features that you rarely use to remove clutter.
6. Dropdowns
There are two dropdowns at the top of the dashboard. The first offers you quick access to three of the most commonly used features of a WordPress blog - posts, pages, and comments. Although with the new sidebar also available for quick access to these features this dropdown may be redundant.
The second dropdown lets you customise the sections of the dashboard that are visible. If for example you do not allow comments on your blog then you can remove the Recent Comments section. Similarly if you’ve got several blogs and don’t want to see the latest WordPress news on the dashboard of each one you can disable this as well.
Summary
Although this is still Beta 2 I would expect to see the dashboard remain unchanged between now and the full release of WordPress 2.7 as most development focus now is on bug fixes. The last time the WordPress user interface was changed significantly it was not well received by many WordPress users, however this time I think the changes are all well worth the minimal transition effort that will be required by bloggers.
A few months ago I wrote a post on the basics of the WordPress visual editor. In that post I mentioned the “kitchen sink” button that opens up a second row of editing controls.
In this post I’ll describe what each of these controls does.
The drop down menu that appears at the left of the row opens up a menu from which you can choose how to format your text. The options in the list will use information in your cascading style sheet (CSS) to determine how exactly to format the text. The CSS is is the style.css file found in your WordPress theme folder.
For example, choosing “Heading 2″ will look in your CSS for the h2 style information, which will generally include font type, size, and any other text effects that should be applied. In my CSS it looks like this:
h2, h2 a, h2 a:visited {
font-size: 18px;
font-family: Arial, Sans-Serif;
font-weight: Normal;
color: #5f5f5f;
text-decoration: none;
border: none;
}
Yours may look similar or very different depending on your theme.
The next button is the underline button. This button works as you would expect it to by underlining text like this. Because most people use underlines as a text decoration for hyperlinks in their blog posts it is not very common to use the underline button on other text within a post.
The “Align full” button is also seldom used. Most writers who want fully aligned text will usually choose a WordPress theme where this is defined within the CSS. However if you find you want to fully align just a small piece of text then you would use this button.
The button marked with the letter “A” opens a drop down list allow you to change the color of text. You can use this to change text to just about any color you want.
Although it can be useful to use color to emphasise specific parts of your blog posts you should be careful not to choose a color that makes your reader think the text is a hyperlink that they can click on.
The “Paste as Plain Text” button opens a window into which you can paste text from other sources that you wish to include in your blog post. This text is then stripped of all formatting and added to the post as plain text. This helps avoid formatting problems when pasting from sources such as other websites where formatting is already applied to the text that may clash with your own formatting.
The “Paste from Word” button works in much the same fashion as “Paste as Plain Text”, and is useful when pasting text from applications such as Microsoft Word or Excel. Although the text is neatly inserted into your blog post it will retain some characteristics such as hyperlinks.
The “Remove formatting” button is handy if you’ve pasted some content into your blog post without using either of the previous buttons and have found that the formatting is inappropriate. You can select the newly pasted passage and click this button to remove all formatting. This has the same outcome as though you’d used “Paste as Plain Text” in the first place.
The “Embed media” button opens a dialog box to embed some external media into your blog post, such as a Flash or Window Media movie file. You can specify the URL to the media file as well as advanced options such as the size you wish to embed it at and whether to autoplay the file or not.
The “Insert custom character” button opens up a dialog containing a list of non-alpha characters that you can insert into blog posts, such as ©, ®, Ð, and ?.
The “Outdent” button is used to move text to the left by 30 pixels. However since most text is already as far left as it can go you would usually only need to use this button if you’ve indented some text too far.
The “Indent” button moves text to the right by 30 pixels. If you want to indent text even further you just press it again and the text is indented a further 30 pixels. In some WordPress themes using the indent button will change the text to a blockquote.
The “Undo” button can be used to undo mistakes. Pressing the undo button will reverse the last action you too. Typing would be considered one action, so if you type a long sentence and then hit undo it will remove the entire sentence. However if you type a long sentence, then format part of it in bold, pressing undo will remove the bold formatting. You can also press undo several times to reverse consecutive actions.
The “Redo” button will undo an “Undo”! If you’ve accidentally hit undo for something you didn’t want to remove you can hit redo to put it back again.
Finally the “Help” button will open a dialog with a few tips on how to use the visual editor. Although it is handy for beginners it is not very comprehensive and doesn’t describe every function within the visual editor. However it is a good start for beginners.
Recently I wrote about how to install WordPress using Fantastico. Although Fantastico makes it easy to install and upgrade your WordPress site it may not be the best method for you. In this post I will demonstrate how to install WordPress manually.
For the purposes of this post I will assume you have already registered a domain, purchased web hosting, and have FTP access to upload files to your web server.
Get the latest WordPress build
You can always download the latest WordPress from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip. Download it now and extract the zip file to your desktop.
Create the database
If your web host gives you CPanel access you can create a new database using the MySQL Database Wizard. If your host provides a different control panel check their support knowledge base for instructions on how to create MySQL databases.
Build the config
Go to the desktop where you extracted the WordPress files. Locate the wp-config-sample.php file and rename it to wp-config.php. Open the file with a text or PHP editor (Notepad will do fine). Look for these fields and fill in their values with the details from the MySQL Database Wizard that you just ran.
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
Upload the files to your web server
Once the files have been extracted and you have built your config file you can connect to your web hosting provider with an FTP client and upload the WordPress files.
Run the install script
Open your web browser and go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php to start the WordPress installation script. Fill in the blog title, your email address, and choose whether to allow search engines to crawl your site. Don’t worry, you can change any of these settings later on if you need to.
Don’t forget to write down the Admin password that is generated for you.
Log in and start using WordPress
You can now log in at http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin and start using WordPress.
If you are wondering what to do next check out my article on 7 first steps for your new WordPress blog.
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