Just a short note to say that WordPress 3.0 has recently been released. It’s a milestone release for the blog software, and includes some major leaps forward:

• Brand new default theme, the highly customizable Twenty Ten. The theme supports easily customisable tiled backgrounds and header images to help you create a custom look with little effort. Coolest thing about this? You can specify a header image for each post if you want!
• Support for new customisable hierarchical navigational menus. Easy to manage, drag and drop and no need to worry about code!
• WordPress multiuser has been merged with core, allowing each and every WordPress installation to operate as a Multiuser installation if the mood takes you. No word on how to activate this just yet, but…wow.
• Support for custom post types. It used to be Blog posts with some support for single pages. Now you can create custom post types for just about anything you fancy – like events, product listings, etc. That almost brings WordPress in line with Drupal!
• For the twitter power users – built-in support for short links.
• Easy bulk updating of plugins, core WordPress and themes.

Check out the video showing some of the new features in this version of WordPress. I think it’s good that they’re taking a little break after this release to concentrate on features for the wordpress.org site. They’re clearly anticipating an upswing in WordPress users after this – and it’ll probably happen too. This version of WordPress looks far more versatile than anything that’s gone before it.

The only drawback? I couldn’t get Writer working with Ultimate Tag Warrior. Until this evening…

Pascal VanHecke posted an excellent solution to add a custom tag provider to Live Writer’s built-in tag support.

Although he linked to some pre-setup information, you could miss this easily. I wanted to highlight that here.

If you’ve got a recent installation of WordPress with Ultimate Tag Warrior installed, log in to the Admin area and browse to Options, Tags and look for the option that reads Embedded Tags. Tick that box and save your settings. (The option to automatically generate META Keywords looks interesting too – might want to switch that on as well)

So, set this up in advance, follow Pascal’s instructions (and helpful graphics) and get blogging with Windows Live Writer!

The person behind WordPress is Matt Mullenweg. He mentioned on his blog this evening that he’d recently done an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.

If you’re not familiar with Matt’s work, I suggest you give it a read. It’s easy to forget some of the amazing developments Matt’s had a hand in over the last few years:

1. He started up the WordPress project and turned it into possibly the most popular blogging platform on the planet. I would say that it’s the tool used by most serious bloggers out there today.
2. Along with Dougal Campbell, he developed “Ping-O-Matic, a tool that notifies search engines of blog updates.” This is a crucial component of what I cringingly call the blogosphere. It allows services like Technorati to know about new content on a website rather than having to crawl it periodically to discover it.
3. He’s been involved with the group that pioneered Microformats (I’ll write about these another time!).
4. As co-creator of Akismet, not only does he provide the best blogging software, but he helps prevent comment spam from making blogging a nightmare!

I’m writing this post for a couple of reasons. a) I was stunned at how much work this guy has done to advance blogging, b) I’m convinced he’s going to revolutionize blogging yet again, and c) I owe the guy a big thank you.

The thank you, Matt is for providing such a life-altering piece of software for free. Blogging provides people with a new means of connecting with a potentially limitless audience, allows them to clarify their thoughts and feelings in words and allows the professional bloggers among us to make a decent (some would say indecent) living! And having tried some of the alternatives, I honestly believe WordPress is synonymous with blogging.

So there you go.

Alister Cameron agrees, and he recently discovered a new plugin for WordPress that automatically thanks first time commenters by email. The plugin is called Comment Relish and was developed by Justin Shattuck.

The plugin allows you to send a configurable email to any new commenter on your blog, thanking them for their comment. It’s a small courtesy, but it makes people feel valued that you took the time to thank them.

Alister identified a few shortcomings with the original plugin, though and made a few changes that allow him to manually oversee the process:

• I dont want the email going directly to the commenter. I want the email sent to me, so I can check the wording, any weirdnesses (like changing the greeting from Hi Darren Jones back to just Hi Darren), and so I can add my own words to the template if their comment warrants it. Sometimes people also make obvious email address typos and I can check for these, this way.
• I dont want a comment sent the moment they submit the comment. Thats not natural. By sending me an email, a more organic and natural exchange occurs. It may be hours before I see that email to adjust it and pass it on, but thats more real to me.

That’s a sweet touch. With a bit more work, Justin (or Alister) could customise the plugin to have it’s own moderation panel in WordPress so that emails could be queued there for review and modification before being sent directly from the panel. That would reduce the need for Alister to route the emails to himself, and would also provide for a more natural delay in sending.

I thought I’d share some of my post-install tips. Some of them are necessary and others are purely my personal preference, but hopefully you’ll find them useful:

• Change the default admin password. The default WordPress password is very difficult to remember, so make it something you’ll be more comfortable with.
• Fill out your profile. I recommend you fill out your first and last names, and website address if it’s different to your blog address. You can use these parameters in your WordPress theme to display your name and website alongside posts written by you.
• Set the tagline for the blog. The default tagline reads “Just another WordPress weblog”. Not very professional. You can change this in Options / General. From an SEO perspective, make sure your tagline includes relevant keywords, as these will be included in blog search engines like Technorati.
• Clear the default blogroll. Much as I like and respect the WordPress developers, their links don’t belong on every blogroll! Click on the Blogroll menu (used to be called Links in previous versions) and delete the entries in there. Feel free to replace with a list of friends/family/colleagues…
• Delete the “Hello World” post. WordPress starts you off with one post and a comment from Mr WordPress. You should delete these straight away and consider replacing with your own introductory post saying who you are and what the blog’s about.
• Edit the About page. WordPress automatically creates an About page for your blog. It’s recommended that you fill this in, because it provides basic information to your readers about the topic of your blog.
• Configure discussion options. This controls whether blog comments are left automatically or if they’re held for review. The default settings are pretty good, but you can enforce stricter rules by selecting “An administrator must always approve the comment”. You can also add watchwords to the comment moderation area so that comments with certain words are automatically held for moderation.
• Configure Permalinks. WordPress handles URL naming automatically so you don’t have to. Basically, you decide the format for your URLs, set it and forget it. Permalink formats are a hot topic, and subject of much debate. My preferred format at the moment is /%post_id%/%postname%/ which gives the post number and then the title (obviously). Some people are taking it a step further and just having yourdomain.com/%postname%/ which is even cleaner.
• Create Categories. This is an important step, as your categories will help organise your content for years to come. Choose appropriate category names, do some keyword research to identify popular terms – even your category names can help with SEO!

These are some of the basic post-install procedures I use for WordPress. Once you’ve got these things out of the way, you’ll want to focus on customising your WordPress theme and installing plugins to give your blog extra functionality. I don’t think it’s fair to recommend a standard set of plugins, as these will vary according to your blogging needs.

Of course, I have my own stock of standard plugins that I use for most WP installs. I’ll share those in a future post.

If you want more information on post-installation tips for WordPress, Download Squad has a more in-depth list. I think some of their steps are unnecessary, or are decisions to be taken when theming the blog. What I’ve included here are the basic post-install tips for WordPress. Enjoy!

Now, I’m not normally one to upgrade every time a new version of WordPress is released, especially a minor point version. But the WP developers seemed concerned enough to cross post this on all their blogs, so I decided it might actually be necessary. A tiny bit irritating, as I’d just upgraded virtually everything to WordPress 2.1.1, but what can you do?

Anyway, I was very pleased to stumble across Ajay’s neat instructions on how to upgrade WordPress via SSH shell. I’ve done a couple of upgrades now and neither have taken any more than 5 minutes each. My previous process was to download the latest version, unzip it into my Dreamweaver site and upload the whole thing again. This could be pretty time intensive, as you can imagine.

I did spend a lot of time trying to get SSH to work, on sites hosted on both Media Temple and Dreamhost (aff). If you’re new to SSH like I am, let me save you a lot of time: Most hosts don’t enable SSH be default, you’ve got to enable it yourself. In Dreamhost, you enable it through the user management on the panel. In Media Temple, it depends on what package you have, so check their knowledge base.

Anyway, do take the time to learn Ajay’s SSH technique – it’ll save you hours in the long run and it’s such an elegant solution to managing WordPress. Of course, someone has to mention SVN at this point…..