Happyblog Design brings you the best free and premium WordPress themes available in the universe. Providing clean and original themes created by many great designers.

There is some confusion about whether Gears allows an offline mode of WordPress and also about the privacy of using this Google browser add-on. This informative post answers the most pertinent questions.

Quick reference guide to expedite WordPress theme development. The content was reformatted for quick reference from the Template Tag section of theWordPress.org Codex, a relative encyclopedia to WordPress theming, and great reference for your WordPress questions.

When I discarded my bespoke CMS and adopted WordPress as my blogging platform (see: Starting Over) I was surprised to find that most of the features I had painstakingly written for my CMS were available in either the WordPress core or one of the multitude of plug-ins that are available for it.

However one feature that I immediately missed was Version Control (or Revision Control). I was quite proud of the Version Control system I had incorporated into my CMS. Hooked into Subversion on the server, I could easily browse the entire revision history of any single document I’d published. I could also revert an existing document back to any previous version at a click of the mouse. It was a powerful and compelling feature and impressed everyone I showed it to.

Imagine my delight then when WordPress 2.6 was released with Revision Control as one of the headline features. I was further surprised by the implementation when I learned that WordPress’ Revision Control provides a facility to visually compare the differences between versions - a facility my own interpretation lacked.

It’s worth upgrading your WordPress installation for this feature alone, but there’s more… as this brief video illustrates:

To summarise, the new features in WordPress 2.6 are as follows:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add captions under your images.
• Bulk management of plug-ins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plug-in update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues. Ability to move your ”wp-config” file and ”wp-content” directories to a custom location, for clean SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with shift-click.
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

Kudos to the WordPress team for a job well done!

I’m currently engaged in the process of trying boost the performance of this website as some of the page weights and loading times are horrific (God, how I miss mod_perl). These are the steps I’ve taken so far:

• Turned on mod_deflate and am now serving my XHTML, CSS and JavaScript as GZIP’d files.
• Uninstalled various non-essential WordPress plugins.
• Installed and configured WP Super Cache but, as yet, it doesn’t seem to be actually doing anything (the administration page tells me that nothing has been cached). I’m sure I’m doing something wrong here!
• My MySQL database has been tweaked considerably during the past couple of days and I am fairly happy with the performance there now.
• I will have to make an effort to reduce page weights by reducing image file-sizes (currently the heaviest content I am delivering by far).
• I’m investigating PHP accelerators and need to learn which of them play nicely with WordPress.

Obviously I’ll document things here as I progress.

10 free WordPress themes that blow many premium themes away.

Dear Lazyweb,

How do I configure the RSS feeds within WordPress so that I can have separate feeds for categories, comments, etc.?

I would like to have feeds for the Weblog entries, another for Asides and a combined feed (Weblog and Asides). At the moment subscribers get everything which is not always ideal since I tend to publish to Asides far more frequently than I do to the Weblog. Also I’d like to expand the site in future with a separate photoblog and perhaps other “channels”.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Updated 15th July, 2008: SOLVED - Manually added feed URIs to the theme file named “header.php” for “Weblog Only”, “Asides Only” and “Comments Only”.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0 (Weblog Only)" href="http://blog.urbanmainframe.com/category/weblog/feed/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0 (Asides Only)" href="http://blog.urbanmainframe.com/category/asides/feed/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0 (Comments Only)" href="http://blog.urbanmainframe.com/comments/feed/" />

Out-of-the-box WordPress is a fine blogging tool & CMS. It is easy to use, full featured and well supported. Yet WordPress can be made so much better with a few choice plug-ins. Since I started using WordPress, I’ve quickly deployed a range of plug-ins to empower by blogging system. I highly recommend everyone of these plug-ins. Go on, give your WordPress installation a little plug-in love.
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