Mike's Thoughts

Seeing as I haven’t posted anything in a while, I’ll go for two tonight.

Just a quick one to let you know that my friend Todd is in the works of creating an awesome new site for Blackberry apps. He is even offering free hosting. Check out his blog post, or the site directly, at otadrop.com.

While the site isn’t up quite yet, be sure to keep an eye out!

Why no iPhone apps? Hmm… must be because Blackberry is superior!

Keep up the awesome work Todd, and I’ll be looking to OTADrop when I can finally get a Blackberry next year!

So here we go, Wordpress 2.7. Although it’s in beta, it is showing some very good promise. I have yet to have any hiccups in working with it, other than some issues importing my blog from my old server, thought that isn’t the fault of 2.7.

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.