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So, I’ve been thinking… I’ve got CS4, I go to RIT and am surrounded by graphic artists and other people with epic websites. Yet mine is based off of a template. What’s more, the main focus of my site has been my blog. Well, it’s time for change. I’m working on my brand new site. You can check out the teaser page at http://mikebruckner.com. The best part? Once all is said and done, my site will actually BE mikebruckner.com, and not merely a redirect to some other site!

The interface has been completely revamped and offers a cleaner look, along with a Dashboard that offers more than the old one ever did. No longer does the WordPress Development Bog take up half of the screen. Instead, you see the Blog, Recent Comments, QuickPress, “Right Now”, and information about your theme. QuickPress is a new feature that allows you to quickly add a new post to your blog right from Dashboard. It doesn’t have all of the rich editing capabilities, but it offers a quick and dirty way of creating a new post. “Right Now” shows a breakdown of the numbers of posts, pages, categories, tags, and comments from your blog. The comment section is color coded to give you visual queues as to what needs you attention.

The navigation links formerly along the top of the admin pages have been moved to modular sections on the left hand side of the page which can be expanded or compressed similarly to the way you would a folder in Finder or Windows Explorer.

One of the greatest features of 2.7? Its automation. Need to upgrade to the latest version? Simply click the update button and your system will automatically download, and apply the update. Admittedly, this feature has not worked for me, though I could just be jumping away from the update screen before the process completed. This idea extends wonderfully to plugins. Now, you can search for plugins right from the Plugins administration page. Simply choose the one you want, and the plugin is downloaded, extracted, and added to your system. Just like any plugin you would have installed the old way, you must first activate the plugin before you can use it. 2.7 also offers you the ability to upload a zip file containing the plugin, and WordPress will automatically unzip and install it.

Overall, 2.7 is a wonderful and welcomed change. It seems to be more professional, and allows the administrators and post contributors to log in, and get done what they want to get done, quick.

• Low power from the laptop
• Limited manageability, especially while I’m away at RIT
• Unreliability the likes of which I have never seen

To remedy the situation, I switched my website hosting (the stuff I pay for) from Microsoft (why I ever did that in the first place, I don’t know), to Linux. This allowed me to transition everything over to a reliable host with more power than I had had before. This means that my blog should run quicker and smoother, and shouldn’t go down every other week! >:|

In short, I’m back! I’m going to continue to write as much as I can, about everything I can. As I mentioned on my blog’s home page, I have encorporated better PHP support, so if you would like to comment on my blog, please register by following the link on the right side of any page in my blog. It’s quick and painless, and you only have to do it once!

Everything is up and running, thought I am still transitioning over a couple of minor things that didn’t come over so nicely (blog tags, images, etc). But everything should be in working order in the next few days. To celebrate, I applied a new theme, which I have found to be my favorite so far, along with Wordpress 2.7 Beta 3. I will be posting about Wordpress 2.7 in the coming days as I have a chance to play with it, but first impressions are good. Very good!

Until then…

As always, let me know what you think!