NASA Glenn Research Center WordPress Users Guide

NASA has been using WordPress for a few years now, and recently the NASA Glenn Research Center launched a resource guide for WordPress development.

The site’s goal is to be “the guide to implementing and using the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) with the NASA Web Accessible (CSS) template design on Glenn Research Center websites.”

With a strong emphasis on 508 accessibility compliance, it’s very impressive to see how NASA has built its own custom theme, and is successfully empowering its team to build feature-rich, accessible, and easy-to-maintain sites.

[Visit wordpress.grc.nasa.gov]

WordPress Tip For Speedily Moderating Comments: Keyboard Shortcuts

A new feature in WordPress 2.7 and on WordPress.com, is the ability to moderate comments using keyboard shortcuts. A few of the popular shortcuts include:

  • Pressing j moves the current selection (light-blue background) down.
  • Pressing k moves the current selection (light-blue background) up.
  • Pressing a approves the currently selected comment.
  • Pressing s marks the current comment as spam.
  • Pressing d deletes the current comment.

For any site that regularly receives dozens or even hundreds of comments per post, this new feature can dramatically speed up the comment moderation process.

Mark Jaquith, a lead developer on the WordPress project, put together a screencast to show how this new feature works:

[ Keyboard Shortcuts on WordPress Codex ]

WordCamp San Francisco August 16, 2008

WordCamp San Francisco, the 1-day conference organized by the creators of WordPress for our users, developers, and partners – will be held on August 16th, 2008 at the Mission Bay Conference Center.

It’s shaping up to be a great event with a tremendous lineup of speakers and topics, and the world famous BBQ lunch.  The goal of the conference is to:

… get WordPress users together, learn from each other, figure out the future of publishing on the web, and have a good time.

You can learn more about the event and signup online @ 2008.sf.wordcamp.org.

WordPress 2.6

WordPress 2.6 is now available:

Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Here is a brief video showing the latest features:

Head over to the WordPress.org blog for more details.

Tips for Updating Your WordPress and Keeping it Secure

Keeping your WordPress setup up-to-date is a critical component of your overall security strategy along with strong passwords, and a secure hosting environment.

As Matt points out in a recent post, with each new version of WordPress it has become easier to be notified of updates, new plugins, and in WordPress 2.5 there is even a one-click auto-update feature for plugins.

In addition, one-click updating of the core WordPress software is something that’s being actively tackled for future versions of WordPress.

So what’s the best way to update your WordPress ? Matt has a good summary:

  1. Upgrade your blog to the latest WP. This shouldn’t be hard. There are plugins for it, if you’re techy use Subversion, there is the standard FTP method, and finally Media Temple, Dreamhost, and Bluehost (through SimpleScripts) all have been pretty good about having their one-click upgrade systems ready with new versions within a day or two of a release. If your host is chronically behind, vote with your wallet and switch.
    • If you need someone to help you upgrade, consider hiring help on the wp-pro mailing list. (It has close to a thousand subscribers and consultants on it.) Or you could always ply a geeky friend with caffeine, libations, food, or gadgets. Just get them to setup a system lik the above so you can do it yourself next time.
  2. Change your passwords, for yourself and any other users you have on the system. If the attacker grabbed your password when you were on an old version, they can still log in after you’ve upgraded if you don’t change it. There’s a new password strength meter in 2.5 helps you pick a good password.
  3. Search through your posts for any that might have been modified, and comb through the directories on your web server looking for anything out of the ordinary. Your host may be able to help you with the latter.

And big picture, if maintaining and upgrading doesn’t sound like something that your organization wants to tackle and you are hosting your blogs on your own infrastructure, consider hosting with a provider that offers one-click upgrades ( we list a few here ) or hosting on WordPress.com VIP.

[ via Photomatt ]

WordPress 2.5 Released

WordPress 2.5 was released this past weekend:

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

You can read the full details on the WordPress.org blog, and watch the screencast below highlighting the excellent new gallery feature:
Vodpod videos no longer available.

For those of you on WordPress.com and WordPress.com VIP, the new code with the redesigned dashboard should be rolling out soon.

[Visit WordPress.org]

WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peak

You may have heard the exciting news that earlier this week Release Candidate 1 of WordPress 2.5 was released. The final version will be out soon, and for Publishers and developers now is a good time to take a look and see what’s new, including:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times

One of the most dramatic improvements can be found in the dashboard:

… we’ve been working with our friends at Happy Cog — Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico — to redesign WordPress from the ground-up. The result is a new way of interacting with WordPress that will remain familiar to seasoned users while improving the experience for everyone. This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint — we’ve re-thought the look of WordPress, as well as how it’s organized so that you can forget about the software and focus on your own creative pursuits.

You can read Jeffrey Zeldman’s thoughts on WordPress 2.5 here, and you can be sure we’ll be posting more info on this blog as we get closer to the official release.

[Visit WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peak]

WP Contact Manager

A great example of innovative work being done in the WordPress community is the WP Contact Manager by The Design Canopy:

WP Contact Manager is a different kind of theme for WordPress. With a little bit of work (outlined in detail below) it turns WordPress into a contact manager. You can add contacts through the regular admin interface, tag contacts, search them and more.

Very much in the early development stages, Joseph Scott points out that:

It’s a bit more involved to setup than Prologue, but it has the same basic premiss, use WordPress as the base and build features on top of it.

You can learn more and try out the demo here.

Desktop Blogging Clients

We’ve received a few inquiries lately asking if a blogging tool exists that a) lives as as an application on your desktop and b) supports creating content and editing while you are offline.

The answer is yes, and Microsoft Live Writer (free to download) is one such tool. It supports blogs hosted on WordPress.com as well as self-hosted WordPress.org blogs. Lots more info here, and you can download it here.

On the Mac OS X platform, Marsedit ($29.95 with a free 30 day trial ) is another great option with lots of capabilities.

So how do these tools communicate with WordPress? They use XML-RPC, a cool technology that allows things that aren’t WordPress to talk to your blog. When Flickr or Youtube posts to your blog, or you use a desktop blogging client they use XML-RPC.

Developers looking to learn more about XML-RPC can read about it on the WordPress.org Codex site and by joining the mailing list.