Need a quick introduction to the new features in WordPress 2.9- watch the video:

For the first time, I didn’t need to use viper007bond Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin to post this, since embedding is covered for a number of video sites. However- it’s still not as easy peasy as they say- I had to switch to HTML view to paste the “embed” code- to get it to work. The little filmstrip button which is supposed to “embed” media- still asks for the user to figure out what type of file they are embedding.

Somehow, even with Automattic (the publishers of WordPress) having a UX person on staff- the user interface is still more complex than it needs to be. I’m still looking at the four “Upload/Insert” buttons- and wondering why they need four buttons for the same controls (I thought I’d written a post about this- but, couldn’t find it).

Other cool features are the ability to crop and rotate images, update and compatibility check all plugins, and a few other cool little fixes. We’ve installed it on our sites- without problem so far (5 days). We’ll report any changes on that as we find them.

If there has been one glaring problem with WordPress for new users- it’s been the posting of pictures- from, like, day 1. While the tools have gotten better, there are still way too many steps and choices involved in “insert picture here” – 2.9 hopefully is going to solve some of those problems:

Images now feel more at home in the publishing process, thanks to the integration of image editing.

For example, you’ll now find a built in image editor. To edit your images, head to your media library, choose the image you want to change, and click on the new “Edit Image” button. There’s a crop tool… which you can also set the aspect ratio for… in addition to image rotation, and horizontal and vertical image flipping.

Media embedding has also undergone a major makeover. Support for the oEmbed standard makes copying and pasting video URLs right into your post super-simple.

Now all you need to do is paste the URL onto a line of its own… Use the new embed shortcode if you don’t want to separate it onto it’s own line… Or “Add Video From URL” from the visual editor icon. And you’re good to go.

By default you’ll find that there’s support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, & WordPress.tv, with more on the way.

via Version 2.9 « WordPress Codex.

No more plugins to insert videos, editing of pictures including cropping and manipulation of image position. Now, let’s hope there is only one “Media” button instead of four to click. Simplification is key if you really live the Wordpress developers Automattic’s tagline “code is poetry.”

Just had a client running 2.3 wonder what the new version looked like (2.8.2) and how it would change his site.  I explained, that other than his “supertheme” K2 may be a bit wonky with a new version of WP- the site would look the same to the viewer- but very different to him.

I did a search of the dashboard design- and found this great post with screen shots from the earliest WP to 2.7 – very interesting, especially to user interface designers:

With the recently launched WordPress 2.7, bloggers now marvel at how clean, beautiful and usable is the new interface. But do you remember what it used to be a couple of months ago? For those who started using WordPress years ago, can you remember what your admin area looked like?

via A Journey Through Five Years of WordPress Interface. « planetOzh.

We started with Wordpress 1.2, the first of the “modern” dashboards. I have to say, that I agree with most assessment of the changes. The thing that has driven me mad the most, has been the playing with the “Press this” function through time- and the really crappy picture upload interface (4 choices that all present the same uploader screen is just LAME).

But, compared to other CMS options- WordPress remains the hands down simplest for the most effect.

If you haven’t discovered the Press This (formerly known as Press It) posting shortcut for Wordpress yet, now is the time to do it. WordPress 2.7 has moved the bookmark from the Write Post page- to the Tools menu- where it should have been all along.

Here is the official description.

Press This

Press This is a bookmarklet: a little app that runs in your browser and lets you grab bits of the web.

Use Press This to clip text, images and videos from any web page. Then edit and add more straight from Press This before you save or publish it in a post on your blog.

Drag-and-drop the following link to your bookmarks bar or right click it and add it to your favorites for a posting shortcut.

The key to using PressThis is to make sure you have isolated an article to a single URL- and then highlight the text you want to discuss- hit your Press This bookmark that you’ve saved in your Firefox Bookmarks toolbar- and the text you highlighted will be put in a floating window- complete with a link back to the source. Blockquote what you Pressed- and write an open and close- and Voila! Instant high value content with less effort.

The early indication is 2.6 will bring Press it back- but, maybe, it’s called “Press This” now.

WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 :: geek ramblings
The return of the “Press This” bookmarklet (find it in the sidebar of the Write page). Drag the link to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar, and use it to quickly post about sites you visit.

Yeah- no more need to do the workaround I posted here:

Word Press 2.5 missing Press It function- and how to restore it

I’m used to having spell as you type provided by Firefox. It’s had it since Firefox 2.0- and because of that, I’ve never used the Spell Check built into Wordpress.

Well, I’ve noticed that while Firefox’s spell check works fine in Gmail and on other websites, it’s not working in Wordpress 2.5.1. I’m going to check it out on a few other machines, but on my MacBook running 10.5.3, I have to manually check spelling with the WordPress spell check when I’m posting.

This will take some getting used to.

If you are also having the same problem with Firefox 3 not spellchecking in WordPress- please leave a comment with your version of Wordpress and your operating system. It will help me gather info for a bug report.

It seems there is quite a bit of frustration with the new “Add media” controls in WordPress 2.5

The 2.5.1 update didn’t fix them- but, at this point, enough people have griped that the development team has to know they laid an egg with this part.

I just grabbed this whole post from the support site to give you the run down, the link at the bottom of the post is from someone who choses much more colorful language to describe his experiences-

WordPress › Support » Problems/steps backward with Add Media functionality
I was quite eager to try the add media functions in v2.5, but it seems either I am missing something or there are some fundamental problems.

Add Video
This seems fundamentally broken. I cannot believe that any user would expect that this would only create a link to a video rather than embedding the actual video. The only good news seems to be that using YouTubes embed code now works in a post without needing to use a plug-in like Easy Tube.

Add an Image
While this works–and the ability to upload multiple images is a plus–the interface to produce even basic functionality seems to have taken a step backwards. Case in point: I wanted to upload an image and have it right-justified with text wrapping around it. I had to go through no less than three dialogue boxes to achieve this.

Step 1: A box for uploading the image and adding ALT text.

Step 2: Requires the user to then click on Gallery for the ability to edit ALT text again, plus set image link, size and basic justification. I am not sure why this cant be rolled into the first step and I am not sure why all the options for justification cant be included here.

Step 3: In order to get the text to wrap, I then need to select the places image, click on the Image button, which pops up a dialogue box similar to what we had in the previous version, which gives the kind of control over the image that SHOULD be in Step 2. And, oddly, the justification selected in Step 2 is not reflected in this dialogue box.

With 2.5, its suddenly more clicks and LESS intuitive than it was before to perform a pretty basic use of an image in a post. It really does seem like at least one of these three steps could be eliminated. In the end, I can get what I want, but now its more involved than it used to be, with a workflow that is not at first obvious.

Add Audio/Add Media
I have not tried these yet, but fear that Audio will produce similar results to video. And its not entirely clear what “Add Media” is for. Flash content? Something else?

But my real issue is with video and these extra steps in just using simple images. Unless someone can show me that I am missing something here. Any help welcome.

If you follow the link, there are some good comments- including mention of the “Flexible Upload” plug in which we are about to start testing.

For the more colorful post- I can’t even post the link- go here.

Oh Noooooo…..

My favorite function in WordPress seems to be missing from the admin pages of Word Press 2.5 rc1 (and from 2.5 after it’s been released) Might be because they claim to have removed javascript from the admin- as well as the AJAX functionality. It’s due to return in 2.6 (but, my students can’t wait!).

So, what to do? If you are upgrading- your old Word Press press it bookmark will still work. If you are doing a new install, you’ll have to make a book mark with the following as the url:

javascript:if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Safari') >= 0){Q=getSelection();}else{Q=document.selection?document.selection.createRange().text:document.getSelection();}location.href='http://www.YOURDOMAIN.tld/wp-admin/post-new.php?text='+encodeURIComponent(Q)+'&popupurl='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&popuptitle='+encodeURIComponent(document.title);

Make sure you copy the whole thing- and replace YOURDOMAIN.tld (top level domain) with your own domain name. ie. websitetology.com for this site.

Step by step on how to make a Pressit bookmark for Wordpress 2.5

1) use Firefox.

2) Bookmark any page (I prefer to save this in the “Bookmark Toolbar Folder” so it’s easily available

3) Go to “Organize Bookmarks” under “Bookmarks” and find the bookmark you just made

4) Right click on the bookmark and choose “Properties”

5) Change the name to “Press-it name of your site”

6) Copy the above code to the location field

7) Make sure you have your URL instead of “www.YOURDOMAIN.tld” ie www.websitetology.com for this site

Save the bookmark- and now- you are free to use the wonderful pressit- like this tutorial outlines.

Hope this helps- and that the code doesn’t get mangled by WordPress. works for you.

All of a sudden, you see your post and the previous posts all are in a different font, or your sidebar doesn’t appear in the right place. Did you just break Wordpress? Probably not.

What you most likely did was put code in your post that WordPress either doesn’t recognize or doesn’t like.  That’s because WordPress likes you to do the writing, and leave the formatting up to it. Here is some info on Validation from the WordPress Codex:

Validating a Website « WordPress Codex
Validation errors aren’t limited to your template files. They can also happen inside of a post. When you are writing a post and using HTML, WordPress might not recognize the HTML and convert it to a character entity, or you may have entered it wrong. If you have a page with a lot of HTML coding, validate it to make sure you have it all correct. And occasionally check random posts to make sure everything is still okay from time to time as part of your general housekeeping.

So, if you are trying to write about php code- WordPress will strip it out- thinking you are trying to run code where you shouldn’t. People who write about code, use a plugin to make code quotable.

The main problem is copying and pasting either from other sites, or from Microsoft Word. These pastes can contain all kinds of tags and formating that WordPress has no use for, or doesn’t understand, or conflicts with the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) built into your theme.

If you look to the right of your ? (help) icon in the toolbar- you will see the “Advanced Toolbar” button that will give you access to a whole bunch of formatting (and unformatting options). It’s here where you can underline text, add colors, use different heading tags- or remove formatting or clean up messy code.

So, if you see something looking wonky on your wordpress site, try the eraser tool- and remove formatting, before the panic, and try reformatting using only the tools that WordPress offers. If you are still finding errors- look in code view- and see if there are more than a few things that say MsoNormal, or Table or div or span in your code. Most of those are indicative of formatting problems.

Today we got the notification that netenberg had released the Fantastico updates for WordPress 2.3.1 after having 2.2.2 for the longest time. We’ve recently started using Fantastico to set up our initial installs of WordPress, but had done upgrades manually. Today, we tried the auto update feature for the first time- and have this warning: MAKE SURE TO DEACTIVATE ALL PLUGINS BEFORE RUNNING UPDATE. We’re not totally sure this guarantees an un-borked update, but, we’re pretty sure it helped after we reinstalled.

Fantastico is a script that runs from Cpanel on our server to help you automagically install a whole bunch of different Open Source software. It’s really handy, but, be prepared to be at least 30 days behind on most update packages (37 in this case).

Our main reason to switch to 2.3.1 was to familiarize ourselves with the new version of WordPress before the next seminar, but, I’ll give you the immediate highlights:

• ST Visualize Advanced Features plugin  is no longer required- giving everyone access to different levels of CSS tags, the paste from Word function, clean up mess code function, type color, etc.  It’s been a plugin we couldn’t live without- esp. for the glyph finder- so it’s easy to find the ©®™½€ etc.
• The plugin list now tells you if there is a newer version! Long overdue.
• The tag feature helps you organize your posts and categories with yet another tool.

I’m sure we’ll discover other great features as we explore- but, as a warning to all- always disable plugins before updating.