2.9.1 comes out about three weeks after the official release of WordPress 2.9

Bugs that came to bite Bloggers and Webmasters in the ass are now fixed including problems with scheduled posts and pages on some web hosts.

Scheduled posts would not be published at the time configured by the user but appear as missed in the list of posts forcing the webmaster to reschedule and hope for the best or to publish it manually.

There are 23 others fixes that are listed in this ‘minor’ upgrade. Five of the bugs listed have been rated high while the majority received a normal rating. Several updates fix installation and upgrade issues that webmasters might have experienced.

You can use the automatic upgrade feature or download WordPress 2.9.1 from the official WordPress website.

_TheUpgradingAdmiN_

I have learned my lesson some time back and now keep my wordpress updated as quickly as a day after release. We have a mirror site for testing first and I can announce safely that the automatic upgrade works nicely and without a hitch. There are a bunch of new features, security improvements and overall speed enhancements.

Batch Plug-in Update in Word Press

When Word Press introduced one click upgrade for pluggins, it was like Christmas in July. But this time maybe on the actual Christmas or perhaps slightly earlier with the release of Word Press 2.9, we will now be able to upgrade multiple pluggins with one click from our WordPress Admin Panel.Optimize/Repair Database Functionality

WordPress has added a new feature to the core which allows you to repair and optimize your database. In order to activate this function, you will need to add this line in your wp-config.php

define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);

Once you have added it, you will now be able to run the script which is located at this URL:

http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php

WordPress Recycle Bin / Trash

Regardless of whether you are a PC user, or a Mac user, we have all had moments when we accidently deleted something really important. But good thing about the operating systems is that they have something where our trash is stored at. In PC its called a recycled bin, and in Mac it is called the Trash, regardless of what it is called, the fact that we can restore it is what matters. WordPress has now added a similar functionality for the posts, pages, and the comments. Instead of permanently deleting these, you can now trash it and then later on empty the trash once you are completely done with what you were doing. By default WordPress will empty the trash every 30 days, but you can change the time limit by simply entering the following code in your wp-config.php:

define( ‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 10 );

Image Editor

The image editor is something that a lot of users were waiting for and it is included in this release. This editor will let you make simple changes such as cropping, rotating, scaling, etc.

Ability to add Post Thumbnails

You have probably seen many sites displaying posts on the homepage with a post thumbnail. Or many sites having the post thumbnail next to each post in their index. Before version 2.9, it was done through custom fields. In this release, you can simply add the thumbnail when writing the post and displaying it in the template is even easier.

In order for you to have this functionality available in the admin panel, you must have a theme that supports this function. It is really simple to add support for this feature and we will have a full tutorial on this coming up soon. You will need to visit your theme’s functions.php and add the following code:

add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );

Once you choose the thumbnail, you can display it on the template using the following code:

We will be posting a full guide for this function very soon because it is a very useful feature.

Extend User Contact Info

WordPress user profile page is quite old and many new networks have gain popularity such as twitter and facebook. Prior to version 2.9, it was really hard to add a custom field in the contact area, but thanks to Joost De Valk for his contribution, now this feature is available.

Simply open your functions.php and add the following function:

function my_new_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
// Add Twitter
$contactmethods['twitter'] = ‘Twitter’;
//add Facebook
$contactmethods['facebook'] = ‘Facebook’;

return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter(‘user_contactmethods’,'my_new_contactmethods’,10,1);
?>

This will add extra fields in your user profile pages.

You can display these on author profile page by using the normal $curauth variable or the_author_meta variable. We will also be writing about these in the near future to explain full details how this function works.

New Excerpt Filter

Up till WordPress 2.8.6, when the user add the_excerpt code in the loop, it would display content with a 55 word limit and once the word limit was reached, it would add [...]. With this new ability, You can now specify a function and control both excerpt word count, and the more text. All you have to do is open your theme’s function.php file and add the following code:

// Changing excerpt length
function new_excerpt_length($length) {
return 60;
}
add_filter(‘excerpt_length’, ‘new_excerpt_length’);

// Changing excerpt more
function new_excerpt_more($more) {
return ‘…’;
}
add_filter(‘excerpt_more’, ‘new_excerpt_more’);

All thanks goes to Ramiy for suggesting this feature.

oEmbed making Embedding Easier

Thanks to ViperBond007 that this feature was added to the core of WordPress 2.9. It is a specification that allows media providers like Flickr, YouTube and others to provide data for consumer applications like WordPress about media.

There are many many more features that are being included in this version. To see a full list check out this page.

Don’t hesitate and do your part for the community. Download the Release Candidate from this Link and start testing out all the features, so this version can be released even faster.

 [Via WP-Beginner]

Make sure you actually do the update! I always he who laughs last has a backup but the admin that does not update his application will be hacked. Not exactly poetic but VERY VERY TRUE!

And if you do not know what I am talking about see this post here on how it happened and this post here on how to fix it!

_TheCarefulAdmiN_

I instructed him to go to his register account and point the domain name to his blogspot address. The old wait the proverbial 24-48 hours for DNS to propagate.

I get a phone call today and he told me

“While this is all well and good and when you type in http://www.hisdomainname.whatever/ it
goes to hisdomain.blogspot.com “(He specifically asked me not to publish his
domain name – i am not an asshole!).

The URL in the address bar changes to be the blogspot address. I know there are ways around this. I know some of you are already doing this. And I would like to make these modifications to this site as well.

So Step Up…Step Right Up…Comment Right Here.

UPDATE 11:58 PM:

So El Di Pablo gave us great documentation from blogger and a quick run
through in the comments and we are up and running on http://www.asktheadmin.com/ now after 8 hours. But
my buddy is still waiting for his dns updates to go through.

Gotta get away from the computer Good Night All. I will leave you with this what using for security products – hardware and software?

..Karl..

..comments excerpt..

El Di Pablo said…
Hey guys, I did this myself with Bauer-Power.net, Blogger has directions for it here.I set my domain name to park at godaddy, then I created an A-name record for www.bauer-power.net and pointed it to Google’s servers per the instructions. I then set domain name forwarding for bauer-power.net to point to www.bauer-power.net.
5:15 PM

El Di Pablo said…
I’m sorry, I misspoke, I meant CName not Aname.
5:16 PM
El Di Pablo said…
yeah.. asktheadmin.com should be the A-Name with domain forarding to www.asktheadmin.com. the WWW CNAME should point to ghs.google.com.That’s about it. I am breathless with anticipation. :-p

Mr. Admin already talked about a great way to boost website traffic using a number of methods. If you missed that post, you can catch it here. However that post didn’t mention using “blog ping” sites. What blog pinging does, according to Wikipedia is, “sending an XML-RPC signal to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material.” Pretty self explanatory right? When you have new material, you send out notices saying “Hey! Look at me! I have new material!”

Some blogs have an automatic blog ping tool (Blogger is no exception) but the built in one usually only pings one service. If you use a blog ping site like kping.com (You can do a Google search and find a number of other free ping sites) you can ping a number of blog search sites or other services that pull content from blogs that update regularly. I like kping because it pings feedburner (among others) which is a service I use for syndicating my blog (You can check out my blog by looking under Mr. Admin’s Links for Bauer-Power).

Like any new advertising strategy, use your analytics to figure out what is working and what is not. This is just one of many other methods you can use to drive traffic to your site.