Another Demo of 2.7

Here’s yet another video showcasing the significant changes in WordPress 2.7. It highlights some of the best features in 2.7.

A video of the new dashboard

Coming soon to PersonalLog…

Upcoming Upgrade to WordPress 2.7

With the upcoming release of WordPress 2.7 on November 10, you can expect an upgrade of the PersonalLog system to WordPress mu 2.7 by the end of November, whenever the WordPress mu code base is synced.

The new release of WordPress is expected to bring many significant changes, including drastic (but good) changes to the admin interface, among other features.

Here’s a preview of what the Write Post screen may look like:

Sorry, but this means that we’re all going to need to learn the new interface. I do agree that the new interface is significantly more user-friendly, even though it may take some time to get used to.

Read more about the new changes.

The significant changes in this new release mean that the admin menus (drop-down) inside the admin backend will be disabled today, and the admin menus on the frontend might not work with 2.7.

I’m sure that you’ll appreciate the changes.

Edit: this also means that PersonalLog will be skipping the 2.6.3 upgrade.

A major problem fixed

Over the past few days, as I have been increasingly active in “fixing” PersonalLog, I noticed something that’s always been perplexing to me. Our database had been increasing significantly in size, and it was rather odd.

I decided to use phpMyAdmin to take a look. What I found was disturbing. (No screenshots.)

The database had over 4000 records in the options table for many blogs. Looking through some of the records, I quickly ascertained that most of the records were duplicate entries: “kb_robotstxt” and the robots.txt file as the value.

I immediately proceeded to wipe the 4000+ records from the tables, which ended up halving the size of the database after optimization. I then went over to the File Manager for a bit more investigation.

The problem was clearly the “KB Robots.txt” plugin. After checking the plugin’s PHP file, I was shocked to see an ugly piece of code that inserted a database record for the plugin’s options every time it was loaded. Since WordPress plugins are loaded on every page load, this meant that the plugin was inserting a new record into the table for every page load, unnecessarily.

I know I could have changed the plugin so that it only did so upon activation. But I was so disturbed by this piece of bad coding that I proceeded to delete it immediately.

As a result, all blogs depending on the “KB Robots.txt” plugin will no longer have access to it. Instead, I did something that was better; I made a default, search engine optimized robots.txt file identical to what the plugin produced, so all blogs will now benefit from the robots.txt optimization, without the need for an inefficient plugin.

Addendum: the database has been further optimized by purging the caches of the various RSS feeds in the dashboard. This means that the first time you log in to your dashboard after these changes, there will be a slight delay (both before and after you load the page) while WordPress fetches the RSS feeds. However, the database is now a fifth of its unoptimized size and will perform significantly more efficiently.

Enjoy your blogs on a cleaner, faster database.

New themes and clean-up

The selection of themes available to PersonalLog users have been really limited in the past months, and some of the themes were indeed quite poorly designed. I’ve removed at least 5 of the poorly designed themes, many of which either created errors or which were not in common use.

To compensate, I’ve added a few very aesthetically pleasing themes. If you’ve found that your blog has suddenly reverted to the default theme, pick a new one. I’m sorry that I had to remove the themes, but they were just too bad.

Aeros

Screenshot of Aeros

This theme uses alpha transparency (and opacity) to achieve a great appearance. The default background image isn’t all that great, so I’ve added the option to override the background image with one of your own choice.

Green Light

Screenshot of Green Light

This theme has a very nice, integrated colour design and excellent abstract header art. It isn’t very customizable, but it’s fine the way it is.

Devart

Screenshot of devart

This theme resembles the design of DeviantArt, which is why it is named this way. The default author information in the sidebar can be removed only by adding custom widgets to the sidebar.

Blocks2

Screenshot of Blocks2

This is a simplistic template that is not so simplistic in its features. There are useful features all over the theme design.

Aspire

Screenshot of Aspire

This theme has an antique look to it. It is very bulky, which makes it unsuitable for people on slower connections.

Journalist

Screenshot of Journalist

This simple yet clean theme was meant for professional journalists. The large body section places an emphasis on content, and it’s perfect for bloggers who want an uncluttered design.

I hope you can make use of the new themes. I also apologize for any inconvenience that the deletion of some themes may have caused you.

Until next time, continue blogging and publishing on PersonalLog!

Scribd iPaper is now available

I’ve added a new plugin to PersonalLog, built by me, which will allow simple insertion of iPaper documents. It is unlikely that I will ever integrate this into PersonalLog (along with the other video embed codes) because this one requires an additional piece of JavaScript code, and it would be inefficient to load that code on every blog.

Here’s what you do.

1. Upload the document to Scribd, or find a document

2. Go to the document’s page (e.g. http://www.scribd.com/doc/6184541/Minutes-for-September-22-2008).

Scroll down until you see “More Info”. Click on it.

3. Make note of the URL

The URL now contains all the information you need to embed the document.

The all digit portion of the URL (before the question mark) is the document id.

The part starting with “key-” and containing a weird jumble of alphanumeric characters is the access key.

4. Use the [ipaper] embed code

First, make sure that you’ve activated the “Simpler iPaper” plugin. (I’m planning on releasing this as open source.)

Then, use the following syntax:

[ipaper id="document id" accesskey="access key"]

For instance, to embed the document above, I would use:

[ipaper id="6184541" accesskey="key-1krukpl84ovn1aktdcyp"]

I hope this is helping you to embed documents in your blog!

Tip: use height=”a number” and/or width=”a number” to customize the embed!

Updates and Features

Having upgraded to WordPress µ 2.6 a very short while ago, there have been some changes to PersonalLog.

First, the “Theme Test Drive” function has been removed in favour of the new theme preview functionality built into the WordPress core. Previously, PersonalLog bloggers could go to Design » Theme Test Drive to show a specific theme for themselves. However, with the new built-in feature, all you have to do is click on the theme image, and you’ll be taken to your blog, shown with a particular theme. (Also, the themes are no longer cluttered on one page, and are separated into multiple pages.)

Second, the custom styling of the admin interface was removed because it was not fully compatible with recent versions of WordPress. Instead, the backend was reverted to the default style with several modifications: the navigation was moved to the very top, and drop-down menus were added. This design is more futureproof.

The Counterize plugin was removed because it did not integrate with WordPress 2.5, let alone 2.6. Thankfully, very few users were using it, and removing it decreased the size of the database tables as well. In the future, I’ll notify users using a particular plugin if I’m disabling it.

The WordPress Admin Bar was updated to a more recent version which has configurable options (see Settings » Admin Bar). It should streamline your blog administration tasks and look good as well.

Fifth, the Flash-based media uploader has caused a lot of grief for myself and others. Fortunately, in the new release of WordPress 2.6, all you have to do is click on “Try the Browser uploader instead” which will make the simple uploader the default method for your account.

Sixth, gravatar support was enhanced in 2.6, which means some themes (particularly newly added and future themes) will show little graphics beside the names of authors in comments.

Seventh, a number of themes were removed as a result of incompatibility and bad design. I’m also about to add a few more themes.

Eighth, some plugins were updated for 2.6, including HidePost.

Finally, you’ll also see some new functionality thanks to the WordPress update — every post is now saved with revisions, so if you save a post multiple times, each version will be retained. You can even compare revisions side-by-side with differences highlighted. There’s also word count in the Write Post screen, showing you the word count below the “Save” and “Publish” buttons. There is now also a Press This link (see the Shortcuts section on the Write Post page) that lets you write a blog post about any Web page, video, or image on the Internet; all you do is go to the page that you want to blog (be it a video or blog post), click on the Press This bookmark that you’ve added to your favourites, and a pop-up will appear from which you can write your post without leaving the page. Cool feature!

WordPress upgraded

This was done a very long time ago.

Anyhow, the WordPress 2.5.1 features are now available on PersonalLog, which is running on WordPress µ 1.5.1.

In case you didn’t know, running podcasts on PersonalLog is also possible: the RHHS Music Podcast (on its own domain configuration, too!) and Frederick Time are both run on PersonalLog with the podPress plugin enabled. You should take a look at Frederick’s Timelog, as well, which is the personal blog that I maintain, making use of some of the most advanced functionality on PersonalLog.

Admin Bar

The new Admin Bar feature lets you access tools in your administrator backend in the form of a convenient band across the top of your blog. It is only viewable by admins, and will not show for guests and non-admin members. Most themes have no problems with the Admin Bar, but the layout of some may be offset by the band.

I hope that this tool will make managing your blog a whole ton easier!

You can download this video as a MOV or AVI file.

More themes

Blue Green:

Blue Zinfandel Enhanced:

Not much to say… but more themes are coming!