Besides, I already have a lengthy “to do” list for each of my sites as it is … don’t these WordPress people know I’m busy?!!?
Seriously though one thing about this release did pique my interest: I was reading about the addition of SECRET_KEY to the wp-config file (edit: this was added in 2.5). From what I understand, it helps secure your WordPress cookies — nice.
More security is always a good thing, right? Like Fenphedra to a speed freak, heh!
This theme is not yet uploaded to Wordpress.net … hopefully soon!
Details
Translucent Dream A dark theme for WordPress 2.1+. Includes Gravatar support for WP 2.5 down to 2.1. “Before the Storm” header image courtesy of MoodFlow.com.
Please read the enclosed readme.txt for troubleshooting, licensing, and other important topics!
Distribution
I have a problem over the past year or so with so-called “free theme” sites offering my themes among their downloads. The majority of these I’ve seen have added paid advertising scripts to my code.
There are only two places where my themes are available:
Any other sites that are distributing my themes are doing so WITHOUT my expressed permission and may be edited or changed from the original code. I will not support my themes downloaded from other sources than those named above, sorry.
I submitted an application this morning for a space reservation at the upcoming Magnolia Festival. I decided to take the leap and get out in the community to raise awareness for Soldiers’ Angels and try to get people informed and involved.
I still need to secure a tent, but I’ve already gotten brochures, fliers, and a table/chairs set (thanks, Jeremy!). So if you’re in my neck of the woods in a couple of weeks, come on by!
Coming to terms
I’m slowly getting used to the new WordPress admin layout. I do really like the Media Library under Manage. I stopped hosting my images here on my blog a while back, and had wanted to go back and clean up the ones that are no longer being used. This will definitely come in handy for that! Plus, there’s a search option, so if I need to find a specific image that I know I’ve used before, that will also help.
Kudos to the WordPress team for that one …
For the past two nights I was unable to find the Blogroll section. I realized today that it’s because it’s been renamed to Links. Having a good night’s sleep helps a lot when trying to suss out new layouts! LOL! I also noticed a Feeds section, and if I’m hearing correctly, the upcoming features will be sweeeeeeet.
Add-ons
I’ve dropped Advanced Tag Entry and am giving Simple Tags a run. Jim’s been playing with it on his site, and I really like their “Auto tags old content” feature for older posts (like all of mine before the implementation of tagging!).
I’ve also deactivated WP-Cache in favor of WP Super Cache. I’ve been reading lots of good things about this plugin, and after following it for 6+ months, I figured it was time to give it a go (and I’m tired of WP-Cache screwing things up).
Jim also recommended WordPress.com Stats to me, so I’m trying it out as well.
So, if anything looks screwy … please let me know!
I updated all of my blogs to WordPress 2.5 last night. I have some mixed feelings about the upgrade. The upgrade process itself went more easily than I had anticipated, and even though I still need to update my theme with new “features” (avatars, etc.), it’s not bad.
I’m still getting used to the new WP Admin layout, while it loads MUCH faster than the previous layout, I’m a little displeased with a few changes they made. For starters, in the write post pages, the categories listing has been moved down towards the bottom of the page. While, it’s not a huge deal, as I have to scroll down anyways to edit my tags, it’s still an annoyance. I personally enjoyed having them sitting right beside my composition box.
I have noticed that the tags, excerpt, etc. boxes aren’t ajax’d, so I can’t rearrange them. It isn’t big deal, but I’m particular about my setups and preferences.
I know … big shocker there.
Something else I’m seriously missing is the “Save and continue” button. One of the developers mentioned that it was unnecessary considering WordPress now auto-saves .. but honestly, I would find myself using that button often — especially after any large additions to a post, or during storms (when a power outage is feared the most!) — times like those I do not like sitting and waiting around for WordPress to save. It would be nice to adjust the auto-save timing.
I want to speed mine up!
Much ado about widgets
They’ve also overhauled the widgets admin layout as well. It took me a bit to figure out where was what. I really like that text widgets now display the title (if set), so you can tell which ones are which. (That was WAY overdue, IMO) But one complaint I have there is that if you have more than one sidebar, you cannot edit them at the same time. You are forced to switch back and forth between them. Also, the way you add text, rss, etc. widgets has also changed from a drop-down menu to a text link — you cannot add them in bulk anymore, and must add one at a time.
Most users will not miss that feature, but it sure makes things easier for those of us widgetizing old themes!
Visually appealing
I’ve read that the visual editor has improved, but I have not yet tried it myself. If it works as well as everything I’ve been reading, I may just switch to it from the old text editor. We’ll see how that goes…
Plug it in, plug it in
I haven’t had any problems with plugins yet. WordPress now has the ability to automatically update your plugins for you. It downloads the updated version, removes the older version in your plugins directory, copies over the new files, and if it was already activated, it will attempt to reactivate it. This is a great feature for those who are not very tech savvy and often need help updating plugins.
However, those like me who fiddle with plugin code, this is no help. I have a handful of plugins that I have modified to fit my theme and/or fix things, and will still need to download the updated versions to compare line by line and make the needed changes accordingly.
Overall
All in all, I guess I can’t complain too much. It does seem to load faster, and I think overall that these were great improvements for WordPress.
Ok, after fighting it for at least a year (maybe two?), I’ve fully widgetized my theme. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected, but then again, once I figured out how to re-write things in the functions.php I started zooming right along!
I’ve been playing with a few widgets here and there. I found a Twitter one that works ‘ok’ … but I’m a bit annoyed because I had to tweak its code in order to get it to display the way I wanted. I haven’t been able to find a recent comments widget that I like (yet), so I guess I’ll keep looking for that.
I updated the WP Plugins in Use list on the Links page. Looking at it prior to updating, I hadn’t realized how many plugins I had deleted until seeing that list. I think I got it down to about half of what it was before.
I’m already working on another plugin for WordPress … this time it’s an XHTML 1.0 Strict friendly alternative to target="_blank" for opening links in new windows (many thanks to Mark @ Weblog Tools for the idea and code to get me started!). Hopefully I’ll have that done soon.
Married Life
Something that a lot of people have asked me lately … “How’s married life?”
I didn’t think it would be much different, and mostly it’s not. Sure, I have a new name, a different tax filing status, and small legal changes here or there, but I didn’t think it would be too different. In a way it’s not, but there are times when I find myself marveling at having to call Jim my ‘husband.’ Not ‘boyfriend’ or ‘fiance,’ ‘HUSBAND.’
It’s hard to explain … but it’s cool. Things are good. Money’s tight, but at least we’ve finally paid off the last of the wedding debts. It’s good. We’ve bought furniture. We’re looking forward to maybe going back to Disney World for our anniversary. We’re looking forward to buying a house.
It’s nice.
Of course I’m still getting wedding advertisements and bridal magazines. Part of me misses that craziness — but then I remind myself of how neurotic the whole thing made me. Heck, we’re still getting brochures from various places all up and down the east coast (from back when we were still shopping for honeymoon spots). The place that runs Branson condos is still sending me stuff once a month, LOL.
I think I’ll call this weekend and let them down easy.
Like Fenphedra to a speed freak, heh!
