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Prior to WordPress 2.7 the user had to choose one of several upgrade options:

• Manual upgrade
• Fantastico upgrade (or other web host provided update scripts)
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin (aka WPAU)

I found the easiest option for me was the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, and so I was excited when automatic upgrades were announced as a new core feature in the upcoming WordPress 2.7 release.  The WordPress team has been going down this road with the core product, plugins, and themes all set to have automatic upgrade options built in with WordPress 2.7 (plugins already received this upgrade functionality in WordPress 2.6, which has been further enhanced in 2.7).

Upgrading to the latest WordPress build

The new WordPress sidebar has an Update item listed in the Tools section towards the bottom.

Clicking Update takes you to the Upgrade WordPress page.  A warning message reminds you to backup your database and files before upgrading, and provides a link to the WordPress Codex pages containing backups advice.  This is one area in which the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin is more useful - WPAU automatically creates backups for you and presents you with a link to download them.

Once you click “Upgrade Automatically” nothing seems to happen for a few moments.  Some people might get nervous at this point but if you just wait patiently it eventually displays a completion message.

This is another area where I prefer WPAU, because it shows you more progress as the upgrade occurs and lets you know that things are happening.  There is no moment where you aren’t sure if things are okay or if the upgrade has frozen.

As this is still Beta 3 the upgrade process may be improved but as it stands it is a simple and easy way for WordPress users to upgrade their blogs without messing around with third party scripts or having to FTP files to your web host.  Just be sure to always backup your files and database first in case the upgrade causes any issues that you need to recover from.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Spellr.us launched at the recent Techcrunch50 conference, and prior to that Kevin from Spellr.us had asked for ideas about how to draw attention to their demo stand.  I made a suggestion which Kevin and the team developed into a t-shirt idea, and now they’ve been kind enough to send me one too!

So thanks to Kevin, Dain and the rest of the team there.  Can’t wait to see what is coming up with the new version of Spellr.us!

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