ContentRobot

PSST! Did you know that up until recently that ContentRobot’s company website had been running atop of *gasp* Drupal? Yes “the WordPress experts” finally converted to this superior platform when we launched our “naked theme” site last month.

While we were hoping to be farther along and show off parts of our new look, we decided to continue to work on the blog-powered website’s underpinnings first. So, we have bitten the bullet and upgraded our site to version 2.5 (and found that the conversion was rather painless).

We are ready to offer upgrades to our clients and feel confident working within the new environment. It does have its foibles, but we are pleased overall with this latest effort from Automattic.

As the weather warms here in the Northern Hemisphere, we hope you are also warming up to WP 2.5. Let us know your experiences so far. We hope our lack of design doesn’t leave you cold - the melt comes soon!

Over the weekend, WordPress launched version 2.5. We have been playing with a beta copy and have been very impressed. If you check out WordPress.org, you’ll even see new site design that aligns with what the software looks like. According to WordPress (and a bit of commentary by ContentRobot), here are the goodies you can expect:

User Features

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — WP determined what’s most important in the dashboard and rearranged it elements to allow you to focus on your blogging efforts. Curious to see if it will be easy to get used to the new “admin” - but it looks great.

Dashboard widgets — These (customizable!) widgets can show you stats about your posts, latest comments, people linking to you, new and popular plugins, and WordPress news.

Multi-file upload with progress bar — Select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.

Search posts and pages — Search now includes pages too, a great boon for those with blog-powered websites.

Tag management — Add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to do with tags from inside WordPress without plugins.

Password strength meter — Helps you to pick a strong profile password. A great feature for us lazy password creators!

Concurrent editing protection — For those of you on multi-author blogs, WordPress will lock and prevent you from overwriting changes if others have the same post opened at the same time. This is a mature step for the software.

Few-click plugin upgrades — For some of the latest plugins in their stable, WordPress can download and install an upgrade for you. However, this is still dependent a little bit on your host setup, so let ContentRobot continue to help you with all your of plugins.

Friendlier visual post editor — WordPress claims that the new WYSIWYG, which uses version 3.0 of TinyMCE,  “doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” This could be the best feature of them all.

Built-in galleries — The new shortcode will allow you to display all your thumbnails and captions; each can link to a page where people can comment on the individual photos.

Cool Developer Features

Salted passwords — By using the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, it makes brute-forcing them impractical.

Secure cookies — Cookies are now encrypted.

Inline documentation — The vast majority of the new code displays inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.

Shortcode API — Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. They give users a short, easy to type and copy/paste string they can move around their post without worrying about messing up complex HTML or embed codes.

Ready to Upgrade?

Upgrading is similar to versions past, but of course you have to worry about plugins that have been left behind. We’ll be letting the bugs shake out and then offering an upgrade path to existing and new clients alike.

The biggest complaint we have about blogging is comment spam.

Have you ever seen what “people” attempt to get posted on to your blog? Going through our spam folder today, we see links and listings that include the following “topics”:

• Porn - from lesbian to teen to sex tapes of your “favorite” female celebrities
• Sex drugs - Cialis to Viagra (and all their related “misspellings”)
• Gambling - casinos and online blackjack
• Are you “man” enough? - now you “can” meet all those gorgeous women who are ignoring you!
• Even those seemingly innocuous “hi” and “great site” comments can lead you down a scary path, should you choose to click on them

Read the Entire Post >

In our last post we griped about the things that we don’t like about WordPress. But we recommend it to all our clients, and here’s why:

• It’s easy to install (both the software and a variety of plugins take mere minutes)
• Customization is limitless (from design to plugins and widgets and programming) you can do most anything you want with WordPress)
• It’s built to make your blog - or blog-powered website - to be search engine friendly (with nice, long and readable URLs, plug-in magic, pinging, and good writing you can get fairly easily indexed on Google and the like with little effort on your part)
• Has good content management (while writing your posts, you can draft, autosave, and postdate, and easily manage comments and spam)
• Worldwide support (the smart and creative development community has helped us out plenty of times - thank you!)

Tell us what you love about WordPress and why you use it to blog!

We consider ourselves WordPress experts, yet we still run into issues that make it an imperfect platform. They include:

• No decent tool to manage images … and it’s still to hard to insert images consistently and easily.
• The WYSIWYG, which is built upon TinyMCE, still likes to generate bad code or even known to mess up code done in the Code Tab … darn those curly quotes!
• The dashboard is still pretty ugly … and we were always surprised that Automattic never included new themes with any new releases.
• Plugin authors that offer no help … sketchy documentation on their plugin pages and no responses to requests for help drives us nuts. We do want to say tho, the majority of plugin authors are great and really make WordPress what it is!
• The snarky responses on the WordPress forums … we feel bad for those (often newbies) who are just seeking a bit of guidance - we all have to start somewhere.

What we do love about WordPress? Find out here.

What about WordPress makes you crazy? What would you improve?