Normally I don’t get excited about WordPress updates because they tend to be pretty incremental (and cause a lot of stress). WordPress upgrades usually add a few features and a lot of bug fixes, which is great but not very exciting.

But I have to admit that I just took a look at Matt’s post on what lies in store in WordPress 2.5, and I’m actually excited about the new version. People like the team behind Automattic always amaze me with their ability to think outside of the box, and innovate beyond what has been expected and accepted.

Those of us who have been using WordPress for a while are used to the WordPress admin, to the point where we probably don’t feel like much is lacking. It seems that new users find the admin confusing and cumbersome, and therefore Automattic has streamlined it in a way that is smart and intuitive.

So here’s an overview of what’s in store as reported by Matt, with my commentary:

The Dashboard

I barely glance at the Dashboard when I enter the admin of my blogs. Most of it is useless, with the incoming links section being the only thing that grabs my attention. In 2.5, the WordPress dashboard will focus on the most relevant tasks at hand for the blogger: a quick summary of what’s published and scheduled for publication, the latest comments and incoming links, blog stats, and WordPress updates and news.

A really exciting addition is the ability to add our own RSS feeds to the Dashboard. That means that users can set their Dashboard to present them with information related to their blog topic, for example, or a project management blog can pull in RSS feeds related to their project. Cool.

Navigation

As I mentioned above, as a longish-time user of WordPress, the navigation in the admin doesn’t bother me. I know where I need to go to get things done, but apparently the navigation can be confusing, and could be improved. So they’ve improved it by separating the main tasks that we do, like writing, managing posts and pages, editing the blog’s design, and managing comments, from the tasks that are used less often.

The only thing I would have done differently is move the blog design editing section to the secondary section. I don’t know about you, but I NEVER edit my theme files from the admin. That just seems too risky. I prefer to make all changes offline using a good editor so that all of the most current theme files are on my hard drive, and if I make a mistake, I can easily undo it.

Write Post/Page

The new Write Post/Page page loses a lot of the clutter of the current layout. Matt says that the new write screen “only displays the information that you’ll use most often.” This concerns me a bit, because I actually use a lot of the stuff that is there, and if I don’t use it all the time, I like to know that it’s there. Hopefully the new layout gives users easy access to everything, even the stuff used infrequently.

What is cool is that the Write page remembers how you left it the last time, and what’s even cooler is that the visual editor now has a full-screen mode!! Although I rarely write posts within WordPress anymore (I use and love Windows Live Writer), the full screen mode will make writing posts within WordPress a heck of a lot more enjoyable than scrolling within the current tiny editor. Matt says this is his favorite new feature, and I have a feeling I’m going to agree.

Manage Posts/Pages

The changes to the management pages seem to be in terms of removing clutter and making useful information more accessible. It’s hard to judge this one without seeing it, but I imagine it will be an improvement in usability.

Colors

The most visible change to the WordPress admin is, of course, its style. The fonts have changed a bit, and the colors consist of lightish blue and lightish orange. While I am a sucker for change when it comes to web apps and the like, these colors seem kind of washed out and hospital-like. But no worries! If you like the old look you can restore them by selecting “classic” under Options.

Even better – you can now have a per-user Admin color scheme! That means that every user on a blog can use their own stylesheet in the admin. PlanetOzh has a little tutorial explaining how.

Testing it out before release

I don’t know if Automattic has ever done this before, but Matt has asked people to test out the latest release and report back with bugs. This is a smart move, since generally new versions of WordPress almost always need to be upgraded immediately to fix bugs and security issues. Hopefully this strategy will mean that we can enjoy our new version of WordPress for a while before having to upgrade.

Summary

What’s amazing about WordPress is that they manage to continually add more features while decreasing clutter. The addition of features does not translate into a weighed-down, clunky interface, which is more than a lot of web applications can claim. I can’t wait to try it out!

This post was originally published at What we can look forward to in WordPress 2.5 on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Have you ever been working on your WordPress blog’s design, when you refresh the page only to find that it’s decided to revert to the default theme?

This has happened to me pretty often, and apparently I’m not the only one. Mark O’Neill says that his WordPress blog would revert to the default theme overnight while he was sleeping!

He did a search, and found this post on the topic, that explains that this glitch introduced itself in WordPress 2.2. A WordPress moderator on a forum topic related to this issue explained the problem as follows:

The root cause is that WordPress reverts to default in certain cases where it cannot find the theme. A lot of conditions are known to cause this to happen falsely. For example, if the filesystem is slightly flaky, then there are instances where it may return an error incorrectly, causing WordPress to reset to default. Another case is where somebody accesses the site at the exact moment you’re uploading a modified version of the theme.

The moderator goes on to say that it’s not a WordPress problem, so they’re not going to try to fix it:

Currently, there is no fix for this problem from the WordPress side of things, because it’s not necessarily an issue with the WordPress code. WordPress is doing what it was designed to do. What’s happening is that WordPress is getting false error codes and responding to them in unexpected ways.

One of the members on the forum pointed out that the problem only began when they upgraded to WordPress 2.2, and another member, justkristin, said that this avoidance of responsibility was unacceptable:

I have to say that, while I will continue to use WordPress because it is superior to everything else out there, I cannot help but be confused by the assertion that it is not WordPress’ problem. If I drove a car which, whenever I was in an accident, forcibly changed the clothes I was wearing, I would find that to be a problem with the car no matter who caused the accident. How can the resetting to default of a theme be a proper reaction to any server error?

The solution, as discovered by another member, tmuka:

1. Rename your theme’s folder to default.
2. Optional: delete all other themes from the server.

This post was originally published at Make sure WordPress doesn’t switch to the default theme on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Here is a WordPress admin plugin for better access to the admin in mobile phones, in particular the iPhone. Here is the plugin description:

Mobile Admin adapts the WordPress admin UI to be more friendly to mobile devices, specifically phones. The iPhone is the primary target (and only supported device) for version 1, with more to come in the future.

Most common WordPress admin features are supported:

• Dashboard sections: Incoming Links, Comments, Posts, Blog Stats
• Writing and editing posts
• Tagging support in 2.3
• Comment Moderation
• Manage Posts page
• Manage Profile page
• Ability to toggle back and forth to the normal admin view.
• Support for plugin includes on post page

Mobile Admin for iPhone

This post was originally published at WordPress plugin for better admin from iPhone (and other mobile devices) on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Recently I wrote about a WordPress plugin that allows you to exclude certain pages from appearing in your list of Pages without coding your template files. The My Page Order WordPress plugin gives you additional Page flexibility by allowing you to manually order your Pages without coding.

Update Feb. 17, 2008:

I just used this plugin for the first time, and it’s fantastic! All you have to do is upload it and activate it, and then go to Manage > My Page Order. There, you have an Ajaxy menu that shows you all your pages. You just drag and drop them until they’re in the order you want, and then click the “Click to Order Pages” button. You can also order subpages in the same way.

This is a plugin that can save you tons of time when you have five or more pages that you need to reorder.

My Page Order WordPress plugin

This post was originally published at Manually order your Pages with My Page Order WordPress plugin on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

There are many situations where you want to make sure that certain categories only appear on some pages, and not on others. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help you do this without having to hack your template files:

Front Page Excluded Categories WordPress plugin – this plugin enables you to exclude posts from certain categories from your front page. This is possible by hard coding your template files as well, but for those who want to give others the ability to do this easily, or who just don’t want to mess with their template files, this is a good solution.

Advanced Category Excluder WordPress plugin – this plugin gives you more flexibility over where categories appear. Here, you have access to modifying categories for five different pages on your blog: archive, home, rss posts, rss comments and search. It currently does not work for tag pages.

This post was originally published at Exclude categories from certain pages with WordPress plugins on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

The Page Link Manager WordPress plugin creates a place in your admin where you can select which Pages will appear in your list of pages, and which will be excluded. This means that your clients can easily do this themselves, and it saves you a bit of trouble too.

Garrett Murphey » WordPress Plugin: Page Link Manager

This post was originally published at Page Link Manager WordPress plugin: exclude Pages without coding on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

The WordPress admin doesn’t have a favicon. That means that when you’re working with a bunch of tabs open, it’s hard to identify which one is for your WordPress admin. Well, Simply Basic has the solution – simply add one line to wp-admin/admin-header.php that calls the favicon of your choice:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/favicon.ico" >

The only drawback is that you have to remember to redo this change every time you upgrade. It might be helpful if there was a plugin that did this for you (hint, hint).

Simply-Basic.com » Give WP-Admin a Custom Favicon

This post was originally published at Faviconize your WordPress admin on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Over the past few days, I have written two posts on two different WordPress self-hosted blogs that have disappeared when I pressed save. I couldn’t retrieve them.

I wrote one of the posts straight in WordPress’ text editor, and the other one I wrote in Windows Live Writer. You would think I could go back and get the post written in Live Writer, but once I uploaded the post from Windows Live Writer to WordPress and saved it there, the local Live Writer version became connected to my online version, so that when I tried to view the draft in Windows Live Writer, I got the online blank version.

Has anyone had this happen to them? Anyone know how this can be fixed?

This post was originally published at My posts are getting swallowed up by WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Yahoo Shortcuts WordPress plugin

This post was originally published at Yahoo Shortcuts WordPress plugin on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

If you want to create a multi-user or multi-author WordPress blog, it generally means having others register on the site, and then log in and write new posts. This has a few disadvantages:

1. You may not want to allow unlimited and unrestricted registration on your site, where unknown people gain access to your back end.
2. The registration process involves sending a confirmation mail to the user, which can get lost.
3. You may want to see posts and approve them prior to publication (which can be done with another plugin, but is not built-in to the WordPress core).

Thanks to Tal Galili and the Hebrew WordPress Google group, I just discovered TDO Mini Forms, a plugin that allows you to easily add a form to your WordPress blog where people can submit posts to your blog without registering, that you can then authorize or reject in your admin. See an example on Tal’s new blog for teachers here (in Hebrew), or TDO’s English sample page for the plugin here.

Here are some features of the TDO Mini Forms plugin:

• Posts wait as drafts until approved by admin
• Can ban specific users or IPs from using the form
• Can “trust” certain users so their posts are published automatically
• Users can select categories and tags
• Users can upload files
• Users can be notified if posts accepted or rejected

TDO Mini Forms Plugin on WordPress.org»
TDO Mini Forms Plugin homepage»

This post was originally published at Plugin creates web form that allows users to post to WordPress without registering on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.