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Version: 2.5
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Wordpress is a blogging system, and an excellent one at that. Quite deservingly, it has an enormous following, with thousands upon thousands of bloggers and millions of readers using it every day. Even this blog uses Wordpress!

And, with the release of this new version, Wordpress just got better. Much better.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Wordpress uses a bunch of scripts and things to generate web pages, in blog format, for you. The homepage of a website using Wordpress generally shows a list of your most recent blog posts, each of which can be viewed independently and commented on by viewers.

All of this is controlled using Wordpress’ administration panel, which you can use to write new posts, change settings, choose a theme for your blog, etc. Before, the admin system was kind of cluttered looking, with a huge number of links at the top of the pages for all the things you could do. In this newest version of Wordpress, the admin pages have all been restructured to be easier to navigate and understand, and it’s definitely much cleaner looking. And it’s got a new color scheme, too! The old dark blue one was kind of nice, but it looks almost ugly compared to the slick new scheme.

The front page of the administration panel, called the dashboard, has gotten a good working over as well. Formerly the dashboard homepage showed links to your most recent posts and comments, with the latest news about Wordpress lower down on the page. But now it’s been redesigned to be, instead, a collection of customizable widgets, making it much easier to look at and use. Plugins (and there’s a lot of them available for Wordpress!) can make use of dashboard widgets as well, so that you can, for example, see the viewing statistics of your blog from the dashboard.

There’s also a new built-in image gallery feature, so that you can easily put dozens of image into your posts and allow people to comment on them individually — very cool. To use it, you just click the Add an Image button (normally it’s just an image that looks like a picture frame; hover your mouse over it to show the text) at the top of the textbox you type your post in, click the Choose files to upload button in the uploader window that comes up, select a few pictures, wait for them to upload, then switch to the Gallery tab, and click Insert gallery into post.

The whole popup window that you do the uploading in, together with the uploading progress bar and the ability to upload multiple files at once, are also new features of version 2.5 of Wordpress. Some people (including myself) have had some problems with the new uploader and have been unable to use it, however, which defeats the purpose of even having it. Luckily, I happened to come across this page on the Wordpress website, which lists a number of solutions to get it working properly — upgrading my web browser and Flash plugin fixed it for me.

Before you can use Wordpress, though, you have to be able to install it. And since it’s a web-blogging system, you can’t do that if you don’t have a website. If you want to use Wordpress and don’t already have a website, then the best thing to do, most likely, is to sign up for a free blog on wordpress.com — Wordpress, naturally, is already installed for you. Some web hosts have automatic installers of Wordpress available to their users, but for those that don’t, installing Wordpress yourself is quite easy.

To do that, you just have to download Wordpress to your computer; create a database for it on your web server, and a MySQL user with the privileges needed to access and edit the database; rename the file wp-config-sample.php in the folder you extracted Wordpress to, to wp-config.php; edit said file with a text editor, filling in the information about the database you created; upload the Wordpress files to your web server; and finally, complete the installation by opening http://[whatever your site is called]/wp-admin/install.php in your web browser. That may sound complicated, but it really doesn’t take that long — the folks at Wordpress call it the “Famous 5-Minute Installation.” More detailed instructions are available on the Wordpress website.

. . . And once all that’s done, Wordpress is installed — now start blogging!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Site Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.