Sandbox Development and Consulting Inc.

WordPress 2.5 has officially been released. The new version includes over 1300 changes (see full changelog) and a variety of new features. For more information on WordPress version 2.5, read the official WordPress version 2.5 documentation.
Download the latest versions of WordPress: WordPress 2.5

In addition to the new WordPress release, the wordpress.org web site has a fresh new look. Great work!

After working with WordPress 2.5 on a few sites for the last few weeks, there are a few things I wanted to point out for people that will be soon making the jump to WordPress 2.5.

• The dashboard is now customizable. You are now able to choose what feeds show up! If you would rather other news sources - you can easily change the feeds by entering a new feed URL.
• The number of widgets you use is now unlimited.A lot of people wanted more than 9 RSS feed widgets, more than 9 text widgets, etc and now you can have as many as you would like.
• Managing media just got easier. There is now great built in support for a "media library". No more using multiple plugins for uploads - you now have all that functionality built in.
• Updating your plugins just got easier. You can now update your plugins with a click of the button - but this means you will need to save your FTP user name and password and then trust that the updated plugin code is safe. While this is very handy and will save a lot of time for people not comfortable with FTP - the cost is security to some degree. I doubt I will use this personally - but I will also see how it plays out.
• Choose your own thumbnail sizes.You can now set the size of your thumbnails (small and medium size options). This setting is under "Miscellaneous".
• Prototype library has been updated to version 1.6. If you are using any custom plugins that use Prototype or any custom template code that rely on Prototype - you might experience some issues if you are using an older version. Make sure everything you use is up to date. (I ran into this issue personally)
• Gravatar functionality is now part of WordPress - no more plugins needed. Here is a quick way to implelement gravatar support in WordPress 2.5+ comments: In your comments.php file you can add in gravatar functionality by simply adding:
  PLAIN TEXT
  PHP:

  1. <?php if(function_exists('get_avatar')){ echo get_avatar($comment, '40');} ?>

  before :

  PLAIN TEXT
  PHP:

  1. <?php comment_text() ?>

  That is it! You could also add gravatars to posts by putting the same code into the post loop to have the gravatar show per post author. (The number - in this example 40 - is the size of the gravatar)

Make sure you check out the screencast that Matt created which highlights the new 2.5 features.

url: http://www.chicagosportstalk.com/

SDAC Inc. provided:

• XHTML/CSS programming
• Custom web design
• bbPress theme customization
• WordPress MU theme customization
• WordPress MU and bbPress plugins customization

technologies used:

XHTML, CSS, WordPress Mu, PHP, CSS, bbPress

front end:

The client approached me wanting a grey and red three column design and I put the rest together. This site is going to be loaded with image posts so the themes for bbPress and WordPress needed to be minimal and non-distracting to the content. The client also wanted something that would be easily customized per blog in the future so I put together a theme that would be easy to modify in the future to only require a few changes for a new color scheme. The theme for the WordPress Mu site and the bbPress site use the same basic CSS so global updates are also easy and quick.

back end:

This project uses bbPress for the forums and then is integrated with WordPress Mu for a single sign on solution. There are plugins used in both bbPress and WordPress Mu to tie the two sites together as well as to aggregate content between sites.

lessons learned/random thoughts:

We are based in Chicago and love Chicago sports and we look forward to following the news and stories that come out of this site!

WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 1 is now available. If you are interested to see an overview of changes from WordPress 2.3.x to WordPres 2.5 - check out the WordPress blog article: 2.5 Sneek Peak.

So many of my clients love WordPress but hate the WYSIWYG editor.
The problem:
When users try to add content with HTML within the content - then go back to edit it, save it, and their custom HTML becomes a mess. For most - simply disabling the rich text editor (Users > User > uncheck "Use the visual editor when writing") is good, but others like to use the editor except for a handful of posts or pages.

The solution:
Download and install WP Codeshield. This plugin will make sure that the rich text editor does not touch any custom HTML code within . All you need to do is wrap around your custom code and you can forget about any more issues with the rich text editor and any HTML you put in/edit.

*Note - if you put this in place and your outputted HTML text looks different than everything else (it is using a monospace font by default) - add : code {font-family:inherit} to your style sheet and the text will not look out of place.

Great news for WordPress theme developers. WordPress 2.5 now offers a new conditional tag: is_front_page(). We have long lived with other options (is_page('home')) or other logic like that, but the is_front_page() simplifies defining the "home page" in our templates. Thanks guys!

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.