Upgrading WordPress

With this week’s announcement of a new security release for WordPress, 1.5.1.3, consider upgrading your WordPress site. You will find information and details on upgrading WordPress on the WordPress Codex at Upgrading WordPress.

If you are considering the bigger upgrade from a previous older version, like from WordPress v1.2 to the latest version, we have a step-by-step guide that will take you through the upgrade of your site and into the new WordPress Themes at Upgrading 1.2 to the Newest Version.

Volunteers Sought for Fundraising and Publicity for WordPress Activities

Exciting and fun events are coming up in the near future on the WordPress Forum and Codex and we are seeking volunteers to help with the publicity and promotion of these events and future fundraising campaigns. If you are interested in participating, visit the Fundraising and Promotions page on the WordPress Codex and sign up.

To streamline things for everyone, we’ve brainstormed a few changes to the process: Those who are interested in testing should join the wp-testers mailing lists, where they can provide feedback on nightlies. When you join you’ll be sent a special download link on where to find the nightly builds and you can report problems to the list. We still strongly discourage the use of nightlies to power your main, or production blog. Please consider using the nightlies only if you are interested in aiding the development of WordPress by participating in testing. Remember that support requests regarding nightlies will not be entertained in the forums. The wp-testers mailing list is the only place where such discussion is welcome.

If you want to watch WordPress’ development without getting cut by using the bleeding-edge nightlies, we have a new timeline that tracks changes in a nifty web interface.

Hopefully with these changes the support forums can become more focused on helping the most people as possible and not guessing what version people run. Those who truly want to live on the bleeding edge and find and squash bugs now have a real place to discuss the nightlies.

Matt talks about helping out with managing the project, while also keeping track of changes in one’s personal and professional lives, and also about why he’s excited about the forthcoming 1.5 release. Ryan, who has been busy with regularly fine-tuning WordPress and fixing bugs, talks about some of the more significant bug fixes and feature changes.

The blurb reads:

Let’s face it. Blogs are in fashion, and why not? Vanity knows no bounds, and there are some people who actually do something productive with theirs. From the influence of blogs on the coverage of the US presidential elections to every random teenager who has problems with their partner/parent/teacher/cat, blogs are out there allowing your most intimate feelings to be shared with random people at wifi hotspots. WordPress is the most prominent rising star of weblog software, completely free and with a large and active community. Styles, plugins and hacks are readily available, with problems such as comment spamming being addressed far more rapidly than competing applications.

Congratulations to the WordPress family!

2004 was defintely the year of the “switcher” for WordPress. May 2005 bring a lot of first-time bloggers to the community. With each succeeding version, WordPress is becoming more user-friendly, less complicated, and more useful.

In other news, the version has been bumped up to 1.3-alpha-5, to reflect some of the improvements made in the past few days, which include lots of bug fixes, and some fine tuning of some of the administration related aspects, themes and the plugin API.

Kai, the maintainer of the WordPress debian package has come out with a debian package for WordPress 1.2.1. If you are a debian user please consider helping by testing the upgraded package as requested in the hackers mail linked to above.

You will find posts from the following blogs at the WordPress Planet:

• Alex King (feed)
• Blogging Pro (feed)
• Dev Blog (feed)
• Donncha (feed)
• Dougal Campbell (feed)
• Kitten’s Project Blog (feed)
• Matt Mullenweg (feed)
• Matthew Thomas (feed)
• Michel Valdrighi (feed)
• Mike Little (feed)
• Ping-O-Matic (feed)
• Ryan Boren (feed)
• Scripty Goddess (feed)
• Weblog Tools Collection (feed)
• Wordlog (feed)

Planet WordPress is powered by Planet, much like Planet Apache and Planet Mozilla.

Now you know where to get your WordPress development fix when this dev blog is silent.

Have fun!

The next version of WordPress will have support for user-defined themes built in. Until now, WordPress used index.php and the comments-files in conjunction with a CSS stylesheet, to control the way it presented the content when published. All other pages, including the category and archive pages were actually generated by passing parameters to the index.php page. The introduction of the theme system does not mean that the old method of styling papges will not work. If you are upgrading from v1.2 or v1.2.1, users have the liberty to continue using their existing design, without switching to the new system. The new Theme system will provide a method for you to define different physical (.php) files for the different components of your weblog. Let us call each of the different physical *.php files a template. So, with the new theme system, you can define different templates for the category archives, the monthly archives, the individual-entry pages etc.

If, as a designer, WordPress user, or developer, you want to get a head start in creating themes, please visit the Theme Development page at the wiki. Now would be a good time to bring any concerns or suggestions you may have regarding the Theme System. You can leave comments at the Theme Development Discussion Page, or discuss it in the hackers mailing list or the beta discussion forum.

Please feel free to improve the pages at the wiki, they are all yours!

Shelley Powers at Burningbird has written several articles detailing her move to WordPress; these are perhaps the most helpful:

• Moving to a New Weblogging Tool discusses her decision to change blogging tools and the factors that led her to choose WordPress.
• Making the Move from MovableType to WordPress details her experience with the process of migration.

Carthik has written a detailed guide for importing your MT entries into WordPress over here.

Last but not least, Gregory Auld at stuff/things has written the first in a series of articles comparing the templating systems of MovableType and WordPress.

THE ISSUES

Nobody likes excuses, however justified. Nor do I like giving them, however justified. We’re all reasonable people here, and I’m sure it isn’t necessary to peevishly point out the fact ad infinitum that we all have lives away from WordPress and blah blah blah. We all know that. The hard fact remains that little has been accomplished with the ‘official’ docs (as opposed to the wiki, which has been steadily updated since its inception) since the release of version 1.0 in early January.

Part of the problem is the rapidly changing face of WordPress itself. The CVS is currently at version 1.2-alpha, with almost daily updates. 1.2, which will be the next official release, is much different from the widely used 1.0.1/1.02 series, and even more different from the still-used .72. There’s new functionality, new template tags, new database tables. This will be a great release, with many of the new features incorporating requests frequently found in the forums (such as subcategories and advanced editing controls).

Up-to-date documentation has always been the weak point of open source (and other) software development. In short, many times the documentation effort simply cannot keep pace with developments in the software. Everybody wants documentation, everybody needs it, but nobody wants to write it. (Including myself, at times.)

WHAT WE HAVE

So what do we have? We’ve got a pretty barebones readme for version 1.0.1. We have the wiki, which now has a useable index thanks to Craig Hartel. And of course we have the forums, which are a treasure trove of useful information in their own right.

Offsite, we have a few resources on miscellaneous topics: Podz has created helpful guides on FTP and CHMOD, as well as a graphical guide to wp-layout.css. NuclearMoose also has an annotated guide to the default style sheet. I’ve written a howto for downloading the CVS here.
Useful stuff, particularly the style sheet guides.

WHAT WE NEED

But what we need is a more comprehensive user’s manual. An updated guide to the template tags; a guide to hacking (should that be plugin-ing?). The user’s manual should contain better instructions on both upgrading from previous versions, as well as detailed guides for importing from other blog systems. (‘Back up your database and run import-xx.php’ leaves something to be desired.) I do have several outlines for such a manual, but have been waiting for the software to stabilize a bit before proceeding. In retrospect, I’m not convinced that this was the best approach. The readme for 1.0.1-.0.2 could certainly stand to be updated in the interim.

We need volunteers to write formal documentation. A good first step for those interested is the docs mailing list, or you can contact me (see my profile for email address.) All that’s required is an ability to write reasonably well. It is not required that you be a WordPress guru, nor a coder. Neither Craig nor I were either (nor am I now) when we became co-leaders of the documentation effort. You just need to write.

I’d also like to see comments from users about what we need. I’m aware that many points have been made in the forums, but let’s start fresh here. I’d like to see specific requests and commentary about what’s weak and what works. Previous comments about the tone of the current docs have been noted (and mostly agreed with), so let’s not devolve into arguments over what constitutes humor. My primary interest is in producing documentation that is useful to both true newbies (which doesn’t assume knowledge; for example, that you know how to backup your database) and advanced users.

Let’s get started over here.