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 some of the new bulk post editing functionality in WordPress 2.7.
In my WordPress 2.7 test blog I have published a handful of posts which I can see by clicking on the Edit link under Posts in the sidebar. All of the posts are in the Uncategorized category and have no tags applied to them.
I can select several blog posts and then choose Edit from the actions dropdown list at the top.
Now I can add the posts to a new category that I’ve created as well as add some tags to all of them at once. I can also edit other post options such as whether they are sticky posts, and whether pingbacks and comments are enabled.
This feature will be very useful for a number of different scenarios that bloggers commonly encounter, such as:
- wanting to create a new category and add several previous posts to it (see “How to choose categories for your blog” at Problogger.net for more on this topic)
- wanting to add more tags to previous posts
- removing the sticky option from announcements that are no longer valid
- publishing several completed drafts all at once (note: you can still stagger their actual publish dates in the visual editor)
- disabling comments on older or archived posts
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 media and image settings of WordPress 2.7.
WordPress 2.6 introduces new media and image options when writing blog posts. However the default settings were quite frustrating and couldn’t be modified to any useful extent. A few settings were buried away in the “Miscellaneous” section of the admin panel but these did not resolve the most frustrating behaviour of WordPress 2.6 and images.
I ended up developing my own sort of “muscle memory” routine when inserting images in posts where I would clear the URL/link field, change the image size from Medium to Large, and then insert the image. I also had to ensure that any of my themes contained code to define the dimensions of the “Large” image size as only the “Medium” size could be changed in the admin panel.
WordPress 2.7 includes new settings to let you set the default image behaviour exactly the way you like it.
Now I can set the media link default to None as I prefer, set an appropriate Large size without modifying theme code, and have my prefered sizes and alignments already set as defaults so that in most cases I just need to click the Insert button when adding images to posts.
This is a big relief and makes the process of writing image heavy posts a lot less frustrating and error prone.
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 plugin management features of WordPress 2.7.
The plugin admin interface can be accessed from the dashboard using the sidebar. Each of the plugin management interfaces is grouped under “Plugins”. Clicking on either “Plugins” or “Installed” will take you to the same page.
The Manage Plugins page will list all installed plugins, grouping them together as Active or Inactive. On a new installation of WordPress only the Akismet and Hello Dolly plugins are installed, and each is inactive. Clicking the Plugin Browser/Installer link will take you to the Install Plugins page.
The Install Plugins page offers you several ways to view and install plugins. You can search the WordPress Plugin Directory based on a term, author, or tag. You can also view one of many popular tags such as “Flickr” and “AJAX”, or upload a plugin in a zip file to be installed. This new upload capability negates the need to use an FTP client to upload plugins to your WordPress blog.
Installing plugins from the WordPress Plugin Directory
To install a new plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory first search for a keyword that will help you find a suitable plugin. In this example I want to find a plugin to help me write series of posts.
The search results will display all of the plugins in the directory that match the keyword “series”. I want to install the “In Series” plugin, so I simply click the “Install” link on the right side of the search results.
This opens a lightbox popup containing the WordPress Plugin Directory information for In Series as well as a link to install the plugin on my WordPress blog.
When a new plugin is installed it is not automatically activated, however you can do this by clicking the link on the installation results page.
The Manage Plugins page also lets you perform bulk actions against your plugins. You can select the check boxes next to several plugins and either activate, deactivate, or delete them by choosing the action from the dropdown list and then clicking Apply.
The new WordPress 2.7 plugin management interface makes it much easier to install and manage plugins on your WordPress blog. You no longer need to browse to the plugin directory, download zip files, FTP them to your web host, and then log in to your blog and activate them. For people that like to test many plugins on their blogs this will be a great time saver.
Akismet is the WordPress comment anti-spam plugin developed by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress. And now with the release of Akismet 2.2.1 it includes stats to show you how well it is working on your blog.
If you are not using Akismet yet…
If you’re not using Akismet yet and spam comments are a problem for you then you should definitely consider enabling it. I recommend enabling Akismet as one of the first things to do with any new blog. Check out my post here to see how to enable Akismet.
If you are using Akismet, time to upgrade!
If you log in to your WordPress dashboard it will notify you of the availability of the updated plugin (assuming you’re running version 2.6 or above - if you’re not, check out my post here).
Click on the little red alert balloon to go to your plugin admin page, and then click the link below Akismet to upgrade automatically. It only takes a few seconds.
New Akismet stats
Your blog dashboard will now have a link to your Akismet stats.
The stats will include the entire history of the plugin’s operation on your blog, so you can see straight away what it has been doing for you since you first enabled it. Here is the graph from one of my blogs showing how effective Akismet can be.
WordPress 2.6.2 has been released for download. This is an important security update for any WordPress sites that allow open registration. From the WordPress development blog:
With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.
This release also includes some other bug fixes outlined here.
How to update your WordPress blog
If you’re not sure how to update your WordPress blog then check out my recent post The pros and cons of WordPress upgrades.
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