For this I have a dummy TNerd setup where I install the latest version and mirror TNerd on it to see if all the plugins work, if Yes, only then TNerd is updated.

It’s a lengthy process because of which I don’t upgrade very often, but that’s about to change.

Next time you visit the Plugins directory over at WordPress.org you’ll notice a “Compatibility Beta” on the right sidebar which lets you select the version of the Plugin and WordPress version and then vote if that version of plugin is compatible with the selected version of WordPress or not. Voting options are “Broken” if the plugin does not work or breaks the core functionality of WordPress and “Works” if the plugins works fine!

That’s for voters but if you are not a voter and just want to check if the plugin will work with the version of WordPress you are about to upgrade to, just select the version and the “Consensus” bar below will show you the percentage of success and faliures.

It a logical feature to have and is just the right thing to do. Folks at WordPress plan to add this functionality to WordPress admin area so that accessing this information becomes much more easier for webmasters.

So, all the webmasters using WordPress click here to visit WordPress Plugin Directory and start voting on the plugins.

WordPress just announced its plans of the upcoming version, WordPress 2.9 to be launched in late November or early December and also made a call for testers from the ever growing WordPress community.

Here are two important things one has to do to become a WordPress tester. 1) Join the WP-Tester mailing list (click here to join the mailing list) and 2) install a plugin called “Making it easy to be a WordPress Tester” (click here to install the plugin.)

The WP-Tester mailing list keeps all its subscribers updated with the progress and need-to-know’s of the beta releases and the plugin helps in eliminating the manual steps involved in downloading and installing the latest beta releases.

As beta releases can be unstable and have bugs it is strongly recommended that the testers install a test-blog to test these builts.

• Click here to join the mailing list
• Click here to install the plugin

As TNerd runs on WordPress as well, I am really looking forward to the WordPress 2.9 and especially a feature that Matt mentioned which clubs WordPress stand-alone and WordPress MU.

We have setup a dummy installation of WordPress 2.8 beta 1 for our readers to test and experience the latest version without installing it.

The Login information remains the same..

Blog URL: http://Tnerd.com/dummy

Login: http://TNerd.com/dummy/wp-login.php

UserID: tnerddummy Pass: tnerdtrial

We’ve just installed the package and haven’t really used it but we have noticed some changes in the alert system instantly. For example, it alerts you to change your default password a user logs in for the first time, "Send this password to the new user by email" option while creating a new user, detects duplicate e-mail addresses at the time of creating users, etc..

Click here to see the entire list of new features and improvements.

We will write more about it once we test it, untill then, either use the information above to login and test the new package or click here to download.

The Login information remains the same..

Blog URL: http://Tnerd.com/dummy

Login: http://TNerd.com/dummy/wp-login.php

UserID: tnerddummy Pass: tnerdtrial

Here is the list of changes WP 2.7 Beta 2 comes with.

• The Upload button didn’t always show. Fixed.
• JS on the Dashboard broke for blogs with no comments, causing several UI elements to “freeze”. Fixed.
• Recent Drafts Dashboard module didn’t show correct times. Fixed.
• Various Autosave fixes.
• Redirect after deleting a page from the editor went back to the deleted page. Fixed.
• Fixed loading of translations for default TinyMCE plugins.
• Added avatars to the edit users list.
• Added some missing translations.
• Fixed some validation errors.
• Fixed some PHP warnings and notices.
• Handle inconsistent file permissions during auto upgrade
• Change Publish box layout to better accommodate internationalized text
• Fix quick editing of the last page in the Edit Pages list
• Fix Screen Options for IE
• Fixes for choose tag from tag cloud
• Rewrite rules fixes for certain hosts
• Don’t check for updates on every page load
• Easier post box dropping
• Preview fixes
• RTL fixes
• Fixed broken wp-mail
• Plugin update and install fixes
• First draft of contextual help tab

Note: Please do not abuse the login information mentioned on this post.

A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, it is less susceptible to link rot. Most modern weblogging and content-syndication software systems support such links. Other types of websites use permanent links, but the term permalink is most common within the blogosphere. Permalink is a portmanteau word made from permanent link. Permalinks are often simply stated so as to be human-readable.

Now, if you are using wordpress or for that matter any other CMS, it’s imperative that the first thing you do post installation is to change the permalinks of your site. If you’d ask me why? I’d say:

1. Because it gives a good structure to your site and your site map looks pretty neat.
2. Because it’s imperative if you are looking to make your site search engine friendly

Let’s see what are the various options available in wordpress for setting permalinks:

By default if you do not change your permalinks structure of your wordpress site, it’ll look something like this:

http://localhost/?p=123: This is highly Search Engine unfriendly and doesn’t give a good look to your structure

The other options are:

Day and name

http://localhost/2008/08/28/sample-post/: Looks pretty good and I think this is the best option available to use.

Month and name

http://localhost/2008/08/sample-post/: This one’ pretty ok too but for a blog that has more than one post a day you might want to re look at this. Good for blogs which are updated occasionally in a month.

Numeric

http://localhost/archives/123: Again almost useless as it doesn’t tell the search engine bots what the URL is about.

Custom

This one’s pretty self explanatory. You can choose the way you want your permalinks to be.

Now that you know what are the various ways of creating permalink for your wordpress. You might also want to look at the page slug for other pages that you have created and change them as per your choice of permalink structure. You can find a complete guide at the official wordpress site.

"It’s been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes. Since then most theme authors have been distributing their themes from their own sites, without a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes. With the success of the plugins directory, we’ve wanted to have those same benefits in a theme directory. Today is the day we start making that happen, with the introduction of wordpress.org/extend/themes/". Read the rest of the post here.

If you would notice there are only three themes and one of them (and the most popular one as of now) is called monotone. This theme is exceptional photoblogging theme. The theme changes color based on the photos which have been posted on the photoblog. You can see the theme in action on my personal photoblog. If you run a photoblog and are looking for a great theme, monotone is one of the best out there. I just wish they integrate the feature of exif data of photos being pulled (Wordpress now supports the functionality of exif data).

I personally think that this is a great move to leverage the power of both community and open source. I am sure that the purpose of bringing together the developers and giving them a centralized platform to display their work, talent and creativity is a great move.

Wordpress is a blog publishing system written in PHP. All data is stored in a MySQL database.The latest release of Word Press is version 2.6, released on 15 July 2008. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

The purpose of this post is to bring to your notice the key new features in the new release of Wordpress Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner. Let’s look at the feature one-by-one. I have tried to put them in the order of importance. However, there is no hard a fast rule to sort them in that fashion.

1. Post Revision This feature is a life saver and is the most important feature at least for someone like me who usually ends up messing with an on-going post and hence looses out on good lines (both in numbers and content). Re-doing  is so much more painful. What this feature basically does is it auto-saves multiple version of your on-going post and allows you to go back to an older version of the post. The most sexy part is the fact that it shows you in color highlights the changes you have made prior to a revision. Something like the one in the screenshot below.

The left hand side (in pink color) is pre-post revision version and the right hand side (green color) is the revised post. Obviously the one in pink is an earlier copy of the same post. Let me now tell you how to achieve this. When you are writing/editing  a post, right at the bottom you can see something that reads Post Revisions (see the screenshot below)

When you click on any of the saved versions, you’ll get various options. The important ones are marked with a red arrow in the image below.

You can now conveniently compare for changes between any two versions of saved post. You can also restore an older version.

2. Press This

Press This is a simple feature that enables you to quickly post a blog post of the web page you are viewing. On the right hand side (When you are in the Write Post area), you can see something that reads Press This. It’s self explanatory, which reads

Drag-and-drop the following link to your bookmarks bar or right click it and add it to your favorites for a posting shortcut. Press This.

Ones you have bookmarked it (I use the the bookmarklet feature of Firefox/Flock) and you click the link (button in case of bookmarklet), you’ll have the option to quickly post a blog post. It looks something like this. Again the important features are marked with red arrow.

As you can only the basic wordpress features are available. That means if you have some plugin (All-in-one SEO) enabled for wordpress dashboard which enhances the capabilities of your post, it will not be available to you in this mode. As a result I am not a great fan of this feature.

2. Image Caption

I haven’t been able to replicate this (because my image upload is more or less screwed up post upgrade) but to give you some understanding of this, whenever you upload an image and insert it into your post, make sure that you start adding caption to it. Following image from CNN has a caption in it and this is the exact feature that has been replicated in wordpress 2.6.

4. Theme Preview

This is another cool feature. No need of upsetting your readers any more by showing them the theme changes you are planning. If you want to change a theme you can see the preview instantaneously. I am not going to get into the details of this. It’s more or less fun to just try to change your theme and see what happens.

5. Google gears

This (Wordpress 2.6) beautiful piece of open source web application is not complimented by another beautiful open source application called as Gears (earlier Google Gears). Following is what wiki talks about Gears.

Gears, formerly Google Gears, is beta software offered by Google to enable offline access to services that normally only are available online. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to cache the data locally. Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Using Gears, a web application may periodically synchronize the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronization is deferred until a network connection is established. Thus Gears enables web applications to work even though access to the network service is not present.

In order to install Google Gears, hit the turbo link on the top right corner of your dashboard once you have logged into the admin area. Google Gear is compatible with Firefox 3, IE 6 and 7 and is all set to be compatible with up coming release of Safari.

6. Word Count

If you search for something like "length of a blog post" on Google, you’ll be hit by a number of people talking about what should be the ideal length of a post. I don’t follow any hard and fast rule on this but if you want to and sound like a pro blogger (who write close to 1000 words in a post) wordpress now shows you the length of the blog post you are writing. It looks something like this:

There are other small little improvements and features which have been added to Wordpress 2.6. I’d suggest you to upgrade to 2.6 just because every new release fixes old bugs and importantly seals any security flaws. Please take a backup of you database before upgrading. I hope this post was useful. Please drop in your comments and have a say on what’s your favorite new feature in Wordpress 2.6.

I use close to 24 Plugins on TNerd, I’ve tried to categorize these plugins so that its easier for the readers to understand what plugins do I give more importance to. I try to keep my plugin list as short as possible because plugins do have an effect on the sites performance, especially if they are user facing plugins.

Plugins have been categorized in the following categories:

• Content Management
• Content Promotion
• Administration
• Readers Feedback

Here you go! Lets start with the first Category……

• Editor Monkey

Author Description: Turns the normal WordPress textarea into a WYSIWYG editor using TinyMCE or FCKeditor. Also integrates spell checking into the editor interface using the FCK Speller Pages plugin and ieSpell. Supports custom dictionaries. By Raj Prasad.

My Comments: I haven’t used many content editors that’s because I never felt the need to as Editor Monkey had all the features I needed and is really easy to use without any errors or bugs. Download Link: http://www.rajprasad.net/plugins/editormonkey/

Note: Author of the plugin has discontinued this plugin as he was not very happy with the changes in WordPress. So unfortunately this plugin is no longer available. Other options are “Dean’s FCKEditor”, “Monsters Editor for WP Super Edit”.

Note: Once installed, default formatting options on WordPress 2.5 Stop working.

• Force Word Wrapping

Author Description: Prevents long sentancesconstructedlikethis from horizontally stretching the page. Ported from the phpBB MOD of the same name – Force Word Wrapping. For support / comments / whatever, visit the support forums. By Jim Wigginton.

My Comments: You will not notice this plugin much in action but it does the work quietly. Keep your articles and comments in shape.

Download Link: http://www.frostjedi.com/terra/scripts/wp/wrap.zip

• Google XML Sitemaps

Author Description: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page By Arne Brachhold.

My Comments: A must plugin for every blog. It makes it really easy for search engines to index pages from the blog. It also offers a lot of control over the XML sitemap in terms of the URL, Build Mode, number of posts in sitemap, memory assigned to Sitemap, Page Priority, etc..

Download Link: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/

• Head META Description

Author Description: Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else. By Kaf Oseo.

My Comments: It’s a good plugin for modifying your header information based on the article. It also address the issue of supplemental results (which no longer exist as per Google) to an extent.

Download Link: http://guff.szub.net/head-meta-description/

• Links-NoFollow

Author Description: Add rel=”nofollow” to any link present in comment By Alex Concha.

My Comments: It’s a good plugin which does not encourage link spam as it adds nofollow tag to the links in comments automatically.

Download Link: http://www.buayacorp.com/archivos/plugin-rel-nofollow-para-wordpress/

• WP-PostViews

Author Description: Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. It will not count registered member views, but that can be changed easily. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.

My Comments: Plugin helps in keeping a track of how many times the article has been visited by the users. This plugin can prove to be a good morale booster for new bloggers who like to see how many users have read the article.

Download Link: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-postviews.1.20.zip

• WP-PostViews Widget

Author Description: Adds a PostViews Widget to display most viewed posts and/or pages on your sidebar. You will need to activate WP-PostViews first. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.

My Comments: Adds a nice little widget which will sit on the sidebar showing the top viewed posts.

Note: This is part of WP-PostViews Plugin

• WP-Sticky

Author Description: Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. Modified from Adhesive by Owen Winkler. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.

My Comments: Certainly helps brining good articles on top. It also underlines the importance of the article if its set to sticky and offers more control on your articles.

Download Link: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-sticky.1.10.zip

• Comment Relish

Author Description: Increases your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘thank you’ relishing type message to users when they first comment on your weblog. By Justin Shattuck.

My Comments: This is an excellent plugin which helps in increasing the RSS readers for you blog. Once a new reader comments on any of the articles it sends an automated e-mail to the users, thanking for the comment and requesting to subscribe to the feed.

Download Link: http://www.justinshattuck.com/comment-relish/

• Digg This

Author Description: Adds Digg story link on detection on digg referer By Aviran Mordo.

My Comments: You must have seen this plugin on lot of blogs and sites. I uses the text version of this plugin which shows up only if the article is digged by a user there after users can dig the article from your site itself. The plugin offers the image version as well.

Download Page: http://www.aviransplace.com/index.php/digg-this-wordpress-plugin/

• Related Posts

Author Description: Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov, Mike Lu & Jon Bourne.

My Comments: One of the best plugins ever! Returns unbelievably related posts on the single post page. This plugin can drastically improve your page views if placed correctly on the page.

Download Link: http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries

Modified versions of the same plugin: http://peter.mapledesign.co.uk/weblog/archives/wordpress-related-posts -plugin http://rmarsh.com/plugins/similar-posts/

• Simple Tags

Author Description: Simple Tags : Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3. Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags ! By Amaury BALMER.

My Comments: The best SEO plugin. Instantly increases the page count in any search engines index thus improving your sites chances of showing up on search results.

Download Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-tags

• Zazz Post Ticker

Author Description: Creates a fading ticker to display your recent blog posts By Stew Houston.

My Comments: It acts as a banner showing of your latest articles. This plugin is very similar to the banner offered by Feedburner, the only difference is that if users click on Zazz Post Ticker Link it takes them to the post page directly but Feedburner banner takes them to the RSS page.

Download Link: http://www.kingofwww.com/plugins/#zazz-post-ticker

• E-mail Users

Author Description: Allows the administrator to send an e-mail to the blog users. Credits to Catalin Ionescu who gave me some ideas for the plugin and has made a similar plugin. This plugin is using PhpMailer. Bug reports and corrections by Cyril Crua and Pokey. By Vincent Prat (email : vpratfr@yahoo.fr).

My Comments: I have this plugin installed but never used it, I didn’t want my registered users to feel spammed.

Download Page: http://www.vincentprat.info/wordpress/email-users/

• Akismet

Author Description: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg.

My Comments: Blog cannot live without this plugin! Install it NOW!

Downloads Page: http://akismet.com/

• My Custom Widgets

Author Description: Define your own widgets and include them into your theme. By Janek Niefeldt.

My Comments: Excellent, Excellent, Excellent plugin helps you create your own widgets for sidebar without a problem. This can be used for any code.. HTML or PHP or JavaScript. Convert your Adsense Code to Widget or any other code.

Download Page: http://www.janek-niefeldt.de/blog/mycustomwidget/

• Registration Blacklist

Author Description: Ban emails and domains from registering as users By Web Professor.

My Comments: It’s a must plugin for a blog where lot of spam registrations occur. You can mention domain extensions from which users will be blocked from registering, plus there are many more options.

Download Page: http://web-professor.net/

• Theme Test Drive

Author Description: Safely test drive any theme while visitors are using the default one. By Vladimir Prelovac. My Comments: Without trying out a theme you cannot imagine how your blog looks like and if it’s a high traffic blog then you cannot afford to experiment on it in real time. Theme Test Drive is the best option as you can try a theme which is visible to the Admin only and make all the necessary changes to the theme before you actually change the theme on the site. Download Page: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/theme-test-drive

• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

Author Description: WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. Go to Wordpress Automatic Upgrade to upgrade your installation Thanks to Ronald Huereca for making the plugin run in automatic mode. By Keith Dsouza.

My Comments: Keeping in mind the number of critical updates happen for new releases this plugin comes in real handy. You can either update the WordPress package on one click or just follow the wizard to update it. Now downloading and using ftp and replacing the source files is thing of the past. It’s a must for EVERY WordPress user.

Download Page: http://techie-buzz.com/

• Lighter Menus

Author Description: Creates Drop Down Menus for WordPress Admin Panels. Fast to load, adaptable to color schemes, comes with silk icons, a option page, and a design that fits within the Wordpress 2.5 interface taking the less room possible. By corpodibacco.

My Comments: This plugin makes navigation within the admin panel really easy by saving a few clicks.

Download Page: http://www.italyisfalling.com/lighter-menus

• WordPress Database Backup

Author Description: On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Manage → Backup to get started. By Austin Matzko.

My Comments: Author Description says it all

Download Page: http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup

• Maintenance Mode

Author Description: Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Navigate to Options → Maintenance Mode to get started. By Michael Woehrer.

My Comments: In case you are making changes to your WordPress theme or package and you do not want your users to see some weird code on the blog, this plugin helps you by putting the blog into maintenance mode which means visitors will see a maintenance page instead of the blog.

Download Page: http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/maintenance-mode/

• WP-PostRating and WP-PostRating Widget

Author Description: Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. (WP-PostRating) Adds a PostRatings Widget to display most rated and/or highest rated posts and/or pages on your sidebar. You will need to activate WP-PostRatings first. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. (WP-PostRating Widget)

My Comments: It’s a very good plugin to know if the visitors like the content on the site. Rating are a very good indication of whether the blogger should bring changes to the content or revisit an older article to see what when wrong if the rating fall. The Widget helps you show the top rated articles on the site.

Downloads Page: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-postratings.1.20.zip

• Comment Email Responder

Author Description: Emails commenter when an admin replies to the comment, if commenter is not subscribed to email updates via Subscribe-to-Comments. Original idea/coding by Andrew Flusche By Owen Cutajar.

My Comments: Creating a good rapport with the readers is the most important thing a blogger should focus on. Comment Email Responder is the best plugin which helps you do that. On a click of a button it sends an e-mail to the commenter along with the admins reply.

Downloads Page: http://www.u-g-h.com/index.php/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-plugin-comm ent-email-responder/

From thousands of participants (websites) Webware burns the list down to 300 and we (users) get to vote for our favorite site in each category from the list of 300. You can vote from the following categories:

• Audio
• Browsing
• Commerce and Events
• Communication
• Productivity
• Publishing and Photography
• Search and Reference
• Social
• Utility and Security
• Video

I voted for my favorite content management system WordPress under Publishing and Photography.  Click on the following image to vote for WordPress.

Voting will freeze on 31st of March and winners will be announced on 21st April. Passes for the Expo are available at the following price:

Conference Plus Workshops
$1,545.00 / Early registration $1,345.00 / Walk-in $1,745.00

Conference Only
$1,245.00 / Early registration $1,045.00 / Walk-in $1,445.00

Workshops Day Only
$695.00 / Early registration $545.00 / Walk-in $895.00

Expo Hall Pass
$100.00 / Early registration $100.00 / Walk-in $100.00

At the time of registration use this “websf08br1” code to get an additional $100 discount.

Expo Resources:

• Register here
• Expo Schedule
• WorkShop
• Speakers
• Expo Blog
• Expo Brochure

Following is the list of other web awards:

• http://www.webaward.org/
• http://www.thefwa.com/
• http://www.webbyawards.com/
• http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0 (claims to be the first in the race since 2006)

Watch the following video for more information

Click here to download Facebooked Or Here to visit the Facebooked post