I took some time today to download the latest version of WordPress (2.5 beta 1) and decided this would be a perfect opportunity to switch to using subversion to manage my WordPress updates. Now that I am all switched over - updates will be much easier to manage.

My initial thoughts and opinions on WordPress 2.5:

• The upgrade was painless - 5 minutes.
• All my plugins worked except for my “Secure Admin” plugin - but that was out of date.
• My theme works fine - after I made some adjustments to some of my AJAX features that relied on an outdated version of Prototype.
• The new admin interface is well laid out for the most part. I am still not sure I am sold on the really light colors, but I will give it some time to grow on me.
• The admin interface is cleaner - it no longer shows artifacts like post and category ID which only a few of us use. (If you want to see the post ID or cat ID, just hover over the edit link next to these items and you can see it in the URL - thanks Demitrious)
• The post interface is much elongated due to the options that were once available in the right hand column (categories, password protect post, etc) are now below the post box instead of next to it. This is going to take some time to get used to.
• Overall - this is a big release and I look forward to working with the changes and enhancements.

For a no-nonsense way to set the order of your Blogroll links within Wordpress, place a numeric value in either the description or notes field then set up the wp_list_bookmarks function to order by that value. Make sure numbers that are < 10 are put in as two digits (01, 02, 03). This is not ideal, but it is quick and easy...and it works.

Once you added in the links to the Blogroll admin, use the following function: wp_list_bookmarks to display your links on your site. The following example will list all links and order them by the value in the description field. The output will not have "blogroll" nor the link category headings. For more information, check out the wp_list_bookmarks documentation.

WordPress 2.3.3 has officially been released. The new version includes bug fixes and a security fix. For more information on WordPress version 2.3.3, read the official WordPress version 2.3.3 documentation.
Download the latest versions of WordPress: 2.3.3

If you would like to exclude one post from your blog, archive, search results or wherever you need to on your blog, you can do so by putting in a small piece of code within the particular WordPress loop:

The following example will show all posts except for the post with the ID of 179:

This is something that I get a lot of requests for and is very useful in a number of situations.

If you ever need to exclude a single category from a WordPress page (archives, index, category page, etc) you can easily do so by using a little conditional tag code within the WordPress loop.

The example below will skip over any post that is in the category with the ID of 35:

This can be helpful if you want to not show a particular category in your blog (if you have a category based site setup) - or if you want to hide some categories from your search results.