WordPress has released a mandatory security update with the wordpress version 3.0.2. It involves resolving some of the bugs and security holes in wordpress.

From WordPress Blog

This maintenance release fixes a moderate security issue that could allow a malicious Author-level user to gain further access to the site, addresses a handful of bugs, and provides some additional security enhancements.

Below are some of the fixes/changes applied to this release; for a complete list click here.

• Fix moderate security issue where a malicious Author-level user could gain further access to the site.
• Remove pingback/trackback blogroll whitelisting feature as it can easily be abused.
• Fix canonical redirection for permalinks containing %category% with nested categories and paging.
• Fix occasional irrelevant error messages on plugin activation.
• Minor XSS fixes in request_filesystem_credentials() and when deleting a plugin.

Download 3.0.2 or update automatically from the Dashboard menu in your site’s admin area.

It is highly encouraged that you update your wordpress installation as soon as possible to this release. You should update immediately even if you are certain that you do not have untrusted users.

It’s Official now, Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces (or MSN Spaces) are partnering up with the guys at WordPress.com to upgrade and migrate more than 30 million bloggers. That basically means now WordPress.com is going to be the default platform for every Windows Live Space user.

Its not a bad thing, Seriously. If you’re a Windows Live Space user you should be very glad that Microsoft made this great move. Now you will enjoy the unlimited benefits of blogging using the most popular blogging platform online; Which not only makes you feel good when you blog but also helps you improve your blogging day-to-day.

This migration is also a good deal for WordPress, as this will be doubling it’s user base.

Over the course of the upcoming 6 months users will have the option of upgrading their blogs to the WordPress Platform, but there is no need to worry. For those who are wondering if this move will affect your current statistics, I should let you know that WordPress & The Windows Live Team have been working hard to make sure that users don’t loose anything from this move and also provide a smooth upgrade.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this amazing merger, and if you think Microsoft made the right decision or not?

If you’re interested in learning more about this merger you can read more on the Official Windows Live Post or the Official WordPress Post.

I have been waiting for this wordpress release for quite a while, its a major update and its finally here.

This is a great time to make sure you update all your wordpress blogs, since this is a major update and it might be a while since we see further updates too.

Without any further a-dues, WordPress 3 Thelonious.

Arm your vuvuzelas: WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard). Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.)

Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation. As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click, and blah blah blah just watch the video.

Be sure to view the below video which shows alot of the new features and changes in action.

Updating your Plugins got a whole lot easier, the Core Updater now allows you to update multiple plugins at once, and also the new support for Short Links are some of the reasons you will most likely want to upgrade now.

Highlights

• WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
• New default theme “Twenty Ten” takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress.
• New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
• Custom header and background APIs.
• Contextual help text accessed under the Help tab of every screen in the WordPress administration.
• Ability to set the admin username and password during installation.
• Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the process.
• Support for shortlinks.
• Improved Custom post types and custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support. (Try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities.)
• A lighter admin color scheme to increase accessibility and put the focus more squarely on your content.

For a complete and in-depth list of changes Click Here.

WordPress 2.8 has just been released..

Well, i just saw on the admin panel of wordpress that wordpress v2.8 is ready for public, so i just had to upgrade as soon as possible.

I haven’t got the time to browse for every single feature, but i did notice the plugin manager seems to have improved and it sure looks faster to install and upgrade your wordpress plugins.

The most notable addition would seem to be the ability to browse themes from within the WordPress Dashboard. With the Theme Browser you can specify the color you want, how many columns there should be, and fixed or flexible width. You can then select and install themes that you like quickly, without leaving the Dashboard.

Major New Improvements (WordPress blog)

First and foremost, WordPress 2.8 is way faster to use. We have changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

Highlights

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation.

But that’s not all – If you would like to checkout the complete list of changes and features Click Here.

Today i will be posting about some nice wordpress plugins, which are both free and useful.

WP-DownloadManager

Adds a simple download manager to your WordPress blog. You can use this plugin to offer downloads on your blog – which can be anything from Wallpapers to Softwares.

WP-EMail

Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog posts/pages to a friend. This handy little script will allow you to offer your visitors to email there friends and colleagues about your blog – which is one way to grow your blog.

WP-PluginsUsed

This handy plugin does what it says, it will generate a page filled with the plugins you have installed on your wordpress blog – This is useful if you have a lot of plugins installed and want to let your visitors know the ones you are using.

WP-Poll

Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and CSS styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

WP-PostRatings

Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog posts/pages. This plugin may come in handy if you like to add a rating system for your post – so that you can offer your blog visitors to rate your every posts and pages.

WP-PostViews

Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed.

Hope you enjoyed these free wordpress plugins collection – more will be coming soon.

The team at WordPress has done it again – This time it looks even better

WordPress team posted the new look we will be seeing in the upcoming release of WordPress - WordPress has been gathering feedback from bloggers around the globe to learn how there blogging experience is and how WordPress can help and improve it.

The feedback gathered resulted the layout to be switched to a three-column style view, the design is quite appealing you must have a look if you intend to upgrade and even if you do not you still must - You never know maybe it will help change your decision. (See below for screen shots)

The style and layout should be one of the most appealing upgrade I think, The release of WordPress 2.7 is expected to be out by November 10th, 2008.

You can checkout the screen-shots of the new and dazzling look of the dashboard interface by scrolling down a little or by going to WordPress blog.

Is that a much better look for all of us? It looks superb I cannot even keep my eyes off it. I can tell you this again means that the future releases of WordPress are sure to improve big time, this also makes our blogging days happier. Improvements such as these are what makes blogging even more fun!

One neat feature that i found pretty interesting and useful was the inclusion of QuickPress!

QuickPress is a new feature that provides the ability to start (or publish) a simple post from the Dashboard when you don’t need the full feature set of the Add New Post screen. Currently, these posts can contain title, text, media and tags. In 2.8 we hope to make the module configurable, so that each user can decide which few fields make the most sense to display.

If you Save as Draft, you will see the new draft appear in the Recent Drafts module right away. Clicking Cancel will clear the form. Publish publishes the post. Posts made using QuickPress are the same as other posts and may be editing by going to Posts > Edit and selecting the post in question.

One last thing: both in this module and on the Add New post screen, we’ve put as much space as possible between the Save Draft and Publish buttons, so for all of you who’ve asked at WordCamps or emailed or posted somewhere to request this, ta da! Hopefully this will reduce accidental publications.

You can checkout more about this new and amazing release at the WordPress Blog.

It seems there is already a new release after the major release of WordPress 2.6.

Its nothing much important or something to burden the wordpress bloggers, it looks like its just a maintenance patch that fixes some issues that were found in the last major release of wordpress which was WordPress 2.6 – WordPress 2.6.1 has been released just about 1 month after the last one.

It isn’t required to upgrade to this latest release, but if you are having trouble with your current version of wordpress you should most likely upgrade as soon as possible.

I’m not sure if i will be upgrading any time soon. I’m not having any trouble with the current but i just don’t like to see that link at the bottom of the Administrator Panel saying Get version 2.6.1, so i might do it later some time.

I’m highlighting the issues, but to see the complete detail visit the Official WordPress Post

• Improved Admin Interface styling for right-to-left languages
• gettext bug caused by certain PHP configurations is now fixed.
• WordPress 2.6.1 fixes a-lot of permalink problems, For IIS users.

You can see the complete list of bug fixes by Clicking Here!

I have a installation of WordPress on my local server (localhost), and i was fooling around with some themes and code – then i noticed that there’s something wrong and it was the Permalinks.

It hasn’t been working for me ever since i installed wordpress. i was pretty confused why it wasn’t.

I made a Free Tutorial Management script which had SEO friendly links in it, That was working fine and since that was working fine it meant i installed the Rewrite_Module correctly.

But the Permalinks on wordpress installation were still not working for me – I did a Google Search and found a post at TechMalaya – The instructions written there were pretty simple and i got the Permalinks working in less then 3 minutes.

The only thing i was doing wrong was that i didn’t set Override All for my Apache htdocs directory.

Finally, it has been solved and i am so glad.

Well, finally i have upgraded my WordPress to the latest stable version of WordPress which is 2.6!

There is a huge list of of updates and some great new features for bloggers which i must say all wordpress bloggers must check out. Click Here to read about the new changes in WordPress 2.6 and what it has to offer us Bloggers.

Here is a list of some of the small changes in WordPress 2.6

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for clean SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with shift-click.
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

It is said that WordPress 2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a Designers point of view – It’s also said that WordPress version 2.5 won’t be maintained further so its a good idea to Upgrade right away. The upgrade shouldn’t be a problem as i just noticed. It was pretty straight-forward and easy – Took me about 5 minutes to finish the upgrade.

P.S:- I finally found where they put the Word Counter – it was on the right side panel just below where you see the Save and Publish buttons.

Have fun blogging!