I’ve been reading quite a lot about WordPress 2.7 (named Coltrane) and how it is a major upgrade over all the past 2.6 releases. I felt I needed to do the necessary upgrade and keep abreast with things. I do know of some people who have BROKEN their WordPress blog installations after an upgrade, so please, PLEASE do backup both your database and your web files BEFORE you embark on this project.

Then, spend some time reading the official WordPress upgrade guide which is found here.

It took me about 30 minutes to read up about the process, deactivate my existing plugins, backup all the necessary files, download the new latest.tar.gz file, I was off on my SSH spree to decompress and copy over the necessary files, while preserving my original theme and customizations.

I forgot to take a screen capture of The Backpackr backend before upgrading, so I grabbed one off my company’s blog site. This is how it looks before the upgrade - fairly clean, but quite severely lacking in navigation, hence the need to install third party tools to improve admin menus.

And ta daaa, the ALL-NEW-AND-IMPROVED WordPress 2.7 - one of the most major changes is really the user interface. They’ve spent a lot of time noting down the common paths that bloggers take and made them handy, with less clicks to get to. The Dashboard on the left is really nifty too with nice new javascripty sliders. Bravo, Wordpress…. BRAVO!

As I was writing this post, I already noticed they have improved the image upload mechanism. Previously, when you select insert image at full-size, they LIE… they still try to squeeze you into some WordPress-thinks-you-need-500-x-400-size or something. Now I seemingly have power to go full-size and REALLY have wide images without tweaking the HTML behind it.

Other functionality that is advantageous to the blog administrator is the ability to upgrade WordPress with a click and a little typing, rather than having to download and manually upgrade it like how I did. It’ll save you a good 20 minutes, at least. I haven’t tested this feature yet, obviously… as there aren’t any upgrades to be had yet.

Here’s a snippet from the WordPress blog that I thought was interesting.

The Story Behind 2.7

The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.

I’ve been commenting on blogs for awhile now and wondered how these people just seem to have their pictures pop-up everywhere. Surely they can’t have uploaded their pictures onto every person’s blog, right? Duh, stupid question!

Anyhow, the answer is really simple - get a GRAVATAR. That stands for GLOBALLY-RECOGNIZED-AVATARS. WOW… what a great idea. So here I am traipsing over to www.gravatar.com (incidentally, they share the same database as Wordpress, and if you have a Wordpress account, you can log right in) to get myself an avatar.

Yup, go choose a suave picture of yourself, and send it to the server. Your email address is now associated with that image, and when you go onto a Wordpress / Blogspot site and leave a comment, your picture will automagically appear if the blog owner enables gravatar support! Amazing, eh?!

For those geeks who want to know how it works, I did a tad bit of reading, and in a nutshell, each blog engine encrypts your email address with something called an MD5 encryption method (the FBI/CIA folks probably created it… hah), and then sends the information in the form of the img src tag to the gravatar servers, which then return the associated image! That’s quite a brilliant idea, and your email address never gets submitted directly to their servers.

Go, get yourself a gravatar today and look cool-er!

Now that you’ve got your blog installed, what do you do next?

You don’t want your blog to look like a plain Jane one, so get cracking, and select a happening design theme, download it and install. Here’s an introductory chat about themes and plugins.

This clip does not cover the process of installing themes, but here’s a video clip by Steve Dougherty that illustrates in step-by-step form how to do it.

As for installing plugins, you could take a look at a step-by-step guide I’ve written on how to do so. It’s really dead easy.

Alright, have fun exploring WordPress even further!

Plugins for WordPress are created to enhance your site and add extra functionality to it. For instance, you might want to have the ability to allow your readers to rate your posts, or to create an image gallery, or get WordPress to do your laundry (yeah rite!).

Most plugins are free - a good place to start downloading them from is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Step-by-step walkthrough to install a WordPress plugin

1. Download the plugin you wish to install. Unzip it on your machine.

2. Open your FTP client (Filezilla - highly recommended, and free!)

3. Connect to the hosting server (your webhost should have given you the FTP information, or else shoot them in the foot)

4. Once connected, look for the wp-content folder, double click on it. Then look for the plugins folder - that is where you will transfer the downloaded plugin to. Double click on the plugins folder and you should at least see “akismet” which is a default plugin supplied by WordPress.

5. Upload the directory that was created when you unzipped the plugin earlier. You can right click on it, and select Upload.

6. Once uploaded, we need to log into the WordPress administrative Dashboard and click on Plugins in order to activate it.

7. In my case, I’m installing a plugin I bought for USD1 called Ajax Comments. As such, look for the header Inactive Plugins, and hit the Activate link.

8. That’s it, really. But for some more complex plugins, you may have to configure them further. Click on the Settings tab which is on the administrative Dashboard and you’ll see the name of the plugin that you installed. Tweak to size, and Save!

Alright, you’ve done your research and you’ve decided to start a blog - either for corporate use, or personal. Both ways, you want to drive traffic (aka visitors, for the uninitiated) to your site. Watch this short 3 min clip that explains one of the first things you must do to get going.

Ruhani Rabin, Senior Developer at Integricity and Alex Lam, The Backpackr having a chat

Summary:

• Generate content - related to your purpose
• Socialize with other bloggers (virtual socializing is fine)
• Leave pertinent comments on blogs that are similar to your own
• Ask questions to garner a response