vBulletin Tagging

We’ve been working our asses off and finally have a beta to share.  Download, test, and enjoy the pretty visuals.  The word most people use when first seeing it is “sexy”.   This is a great design, and I’m very pleased with how it has turned out.  When the visuals are complete and the new icons are in, 2.7 will be a very good looking release.

Try this exercise.  Load up the Write Post page in 2.6 and in 2.7.   Compare the location of the title field between the two.  Notice the vertical distance.  That’s one of my favorite 2.7 features.

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WP’s automatic upgrade can be used to automatically upgrade to betas and nightly builds for the development branch or the latest stable branch.  To get onto a development upgrade path you must first make a small change to wp-includes/version.php.

The current release of WP is 2.8.  If you peek in the version.php file, you will see this:

$wp_version = ‘2.8′;

If you would like to try out the latest development builds for the upcoming 2.8.1 release, change that line to this:

$wp_version = ‘2.8.1-dev’;

“dev” can be any string. The presence of a suffix on the version tells the automatic upgrade to put you on…

2.7.1, the first 2.7 maintenance release, is almost ready.  So far, 66 tickets are fixed in 2.7.1.  There are another 50 tickets open against the 2.7.1 milestone, but most of those will be moved to 2.7.2 or 2.8.  If there are tickets in that list you would really like to see fixed in 2.7.1, drop a comment.

To automatically upgrade from 2.7 to 2.7.1 Beta 1, change the version in your wp-includes/version.php file from 2.7 to 2.7.1-beta and then visit Tools->Upgrade.  Otherwise, download the beta package and install manually.

Finally, at last, it’s here.  And now, on to 2.8.  There were several areas that we didn’t have time to re-design for 2.7.  2.8 will focus on making the media and widgets UI as good as the rest of WP.  There will be a few new features as well.  Theme browsing and one-click theme install is a likely one.  After a short rest to recover from 2.7, we’ll start brainstorming new features and put the results on the 2.8 codex page.

We’ll likely do the usual .1 release in a month to address any bugs that slipped through the 2.7 beta…

As announced on the wordpress.com blog, 2.7 is coming to wordpress.com tomorrow.  Actually, 2.7 has been running on wordpress.com for awhile, just not the exciting new admin UI.  Here’s a peek at what the admin will look like on wordpress.com.

The final release of 2.7 won’t be here until next week. There is still a lot of coordination and management type stuff to do before we’re ready to release.

2.7.1 is out, improving upon a solid 2.7 release.

The next version of the iPhone app is almost out and features comment moderation.

2.8 is well underway.  So far there have been lots of script loading and DB performance improvements.  The first cut of the theme installer is in, and the redesign of the Widgets admin UI is beginning.  Custom tag taxonomies now have some built-in admin UI,  and proper timezone and DST support is available if you are running PHP 5.

A major release segues right into bug fixing for the first maintenance release.  You can follow what is being fixed for 2.7.1 here.  So far there are five small fixes.

This weekend will go down in history. It’s the first time I’ve been seriously sick in well over 5 years. A bug infected my son on Wednesday, but he got over it quickly enough. Then the same bug hit my wife and I on Sunday morning and we’re just getting over it now.

Odd that a worm attacks software I work on and I get very sick at the same time. Unfortunately I couldn’t run an exploit scanner and remove the bug but my body’s defenses took care of the bugs eventually.

All this leads me to a handy little plugin called…

New Plugins

Post Videos and Photo Galleries

Post videos and photo galleries plugin is a professional tool for webmasters and bloggers to add streaming videos, image galleries and music playlists to their site, it includes uploading, transcoding/resizing, a selection of players and media hosting on a dedicatedstreaming servers at cincopa.com.

BuddyPress Author Exposed

Display metadata about post author: name, email, website, and BuddyPress profile.

Post Views Dashboard

Post Views Summary is a dashboard plugin that shows the 10 most and least visited posts and pages. (Page in German)

User Messages

A plugin to facilitate communication between your users.

HTML Page Sitemap

Adds an HTML (Not XML) sitemap of your…

A stitch in time saves nine. I couldn’t sew my way out of a bag, but it’s true advice for bloggers as well — a little bit of work on an upgrade now saves a lot of work fixing something later.

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you…

Sol

Sol is a fixed-width, two column Thematic child theme with a focus on attractive and clear typography. It is fully widgetised and plugin ready

FabricPress

Two column, widget ready theme available in three color schemes

Just Grey

3-column flexible-width theme in gray and blue. Featuring an Author Info page and gravatars along with Custom Archives, Sitemap and Full-Width No Sidebars page templates. There is an options page for setting the text in the Info Text Box.

Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get listed in these releases.

The vBSEO team is proud to announce its latest release!

Don’t miss out on the 72 hr vBSEO End of Summer Sale!

<div id="cd-container">End Of Summer Sale ends in:<script src="http://www.vbseo.com/countdown.php?timezone=US/Eastern&amp;countto=2009-09-07 20:00:00&amp;do=t&amp;data=0"></script></div>
vBSEO End of Summer Sale Details

vBSEO 3.3.1 is now available in your Downloads area. 3.3.1 is primarily a maintenance release, but does include some new features as outlined below. This update is available for all non-expired licenses. [Check License Status]

Bug Fixes:
FIX: Invalid argument in functions_vbseo.php on some server instances
FIX: Virtual HTML breaks W3 validation
FIX: vBSEO Acronym expansion for Guests
FIX: Acronyms – Ajax edit
FIX: Missing 301 redirect for member profiles applied
FIX: Social Groups – Discussion title caused invalid…

vBSEO End Of Summer Sale, Tweet-enable your website!
For the next 72 Hours ONLY, vBSEO will be holding a special end of summer sale event.

<div id="cd-container">End Of Summer Sale ends in:<script src="http://www.vbseo.com/countdown.php?timezone=US/Eastern&amp;countto=2009-09-07 20:00:00&amp;do=t&amp;data=0"></script></div>

15% off EVERYTHING in our Inventory
+
500 exclusive Tweetboard Alpha Invites (on a first-come, first-served basis)
(Use Promo Code TBSUMMER72)

72 Hours ONLY!
This sale is flat 15% through the full 72 hours. There are no laddered or time-based discounts like we had in our last sale. But, it only lasts for 72 hours, ending at the end of Labor Day, Monday night. After that, it is done.…

Otto42 of OttoDestruct, a key WordPress developer and supporter, reports that there is an “attack” on older versions of WordPress right now. The number of sites hit by this is growing every hour. Protect your WordPress blog now: UPDATE NOW!!!

Update your WordPress blog before you continue reading this post. That’s how critical this issue is.

Things You Need to Know Now

Here is what you need to know right now, constantly updated with news as we get it.

UPDATE NOW! Reports are that this attack impacts ALL versions of WordPress up to 2.8.3 and 2.8.4, the most recent release.
Report from WordPress…

We are in need of beta testers for the upcoming WordPress iPhone application release version 1.4!  If you’d like to be part of the fun and excitement and test the latest release on your device, please go and fill out a brief survey! (See update below.)

Please note that this release only supports OS 3.0 and higher, and we have limited spots as Apple restricts these beta tests to a max of 100 people. We’ll be picking the beta testers at random — and if chosen, you’ll receive an email with instructions.

Why do a beta test ? We would like to…