Category: WordPress News

Learn WordPress 6.3

The latest version of WordPress is now 6.3

It's very helpful to learn all about this new version even you are not using this latest version. It will help you to prepare your website for the upgrade.

Explore WordPress 6.3 and Learn the New Features

First of all you need to prepare a good compatible hosting server and then check the right plugins that are compatible to this version of WordPress. Jonathan's "Testing your plugins for PHP version compatibility is a great helpful tutorial! If you are a WordPress developer, you need to update your PHP knowledge to PHP 8, because PHP 7 is now officially End of Life (EOL)?Any plugins you develop and maintain must support PHP 8.

WordPress 3.8.3

Again? Within 7 or 8 days, we upgraded from WordPress 3.8.2 to WordPress 3.8.3.

Does WordPress Update Too Frequently?

Frequent software updates may cause users a lot of trouble when they don't know how and some have too much customization (so auto updates may break the themes or plugins they have.

Fortunately, the websites we have been designing for our clients can update without breaking the code and the sites.
Also we love Softaculous Auto Update, which can update WordPress and send us an email notice: "Your site has updated to WordPress 3.8.3" within one day or two.

You may not have to update from 3.8.2 if you don't use "Quick Draft"

The “Quick Draft” tool on the dashboard screen was broken in the 3.8.2 update. If you tried to use it, your draft would disappear and it wouldn’t save. While we doubt anyone was writing a novella using this tool, any loss of content is unacceptable to us.

WordPress 3.9

You can expect WordPress 3.9 in a week or sooner as we were told by the official WordPress development team.

WordPress 3.8.2

Quick, you need to update your WordPress 3.8.x to 3.8.2 if you have not already!

Version 3.8.2 addressed some security issues and fixed 9 bugs and Version 3.8.1 addressed 31 bugs.
You may have serious security issues if you just ignor it.

  • Potential authentication cookie forgery. CVE-2014-0166.
  • Privilege escalation: prevent contributors from publishing posts. CVE-2014-0165.
  • (Hardening) Pass along additional information when processing pingbacks to help hosts identify potentially abusive requests.
  • (Hardening) Fix a low-impact SQL injection by trusted users.
  • (Hardening) Prevent possible cross-domain scripting through Plupload, the third-party library WordPress uses for uploading files.

wp3.8.2

WordPress Meetups

Meetups are great places where you can meet people who like the same stuff. WordPress meetups can help WordPress users learn from experts, developers or other WordPress users by sharing experience and lessons learned through failures or success.

I live and work in San Francisco Bay Area or the Silicon Valley satellite cities so I love to visit these WordPress meetups

1) http://www.meetup.com/wordpress-sf  The San Francisco WordPress Meetup led by Zach Berke

Upcoming event:

Optimizing WordPress for Conversions

  • Time: Wednesday, April 2, 2014 6:00 PM

  • Meeting address:

    Automattic's New Home

    132 Hawthorne Lane, San Francisco, CA (map)

2) http://www.meetup.com/Eastbay-WordPress-Meetup/ East Bay WP Meetup (  they usually meet in Oakland, Northern California )

Their next meetup:

Setting up Google Analytics in WordPress

  • Sunday, April 20, 2014

     to 

  • Tech Liminal 

    555 12th St, Oakland, CA (map)

Some themes come with a place to paste your Google Analytics tracking code, but there are also plenty of plugins, and some of them display your analytics in your WordPress dashboard. Is it better to put your tracking code in your theme, or a plugin? Which plugins are best, and why?

I'll sign up for both above and hope to meet you there!

 

WordPress 4.0 ?

Oh, no. Too soon to expect WordPress Version 4.0 as we are currently have 3.4.2 as the stable version and 3.5 beta 3 is in the shop.

For security purpose, we should never run beta version for production.

Trying the Latest WordPress

If you want to try the latest version of WordPress, you may do so on your sand box or dev server to test out your plugins. To get the latest version of beta, you may install "WordPress Beta Tester" at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/.

This plugin "Allows you to easily upgrade to Beta releases. Once installed it will enable you to upgrade your blog to the latest Beta or Release candidate at the click of a button using the built in upgrader. " After you install and activate this plugin, go to Tools, then Beta Testing, then check the second option
* Bleeding edge nightlies This is the bleeding edge development code which may be unstable at times. Only use this if you really know what you are doing.

You'll see a fair warning:
Please note: Once you have switched your blog to one of these beta versions of software it will not always be possible to downgrade as the database structure maybe updated during the development of a major release.

Then you can head for the Dashboard, Updates ( yourdomain/installationfolder/wp-admin/update-core.php ), you can click "Update Now". Then after you go to the Dashboard Home, you will see:
You are using WordPress 3.5-beta3-22584. (as of today 11/15/2012 ).

You may also directly download the latest WordPress beta version 3.5 (as of this writing) at http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.5-beta3.zip after the release note at http://wordpress.org/news/2012/11/wordpress-3-5-beta-3/

Meanwhile, you may want to keep your eyes on the known issues and bug fixes by checking http://wordpress.org/news/2012/11/wordpress-3-5-beta-3/ .

We will sure to publish new video tutorials on WordPress 4.0 when it comes out, but we saw a guy try to get grab our attention using a "WordPress 4.0" title for his video and end up getting a few "dislike". In the video, it even uses the typo "WopdPress 4.0" to "fool" audience. It looks like a "April Fool" joke.

Looking ahead is good but we shall never rush. We are glad that WordPress development does not rush its users from 3.0 to 4.0, then WordPress 5.0.... like Drupal 5, Drupal 6, Drupal 7 (and their upgrade from Drupal 6 to 7 is pretty complicated to many regular users: ...Disable all custom and contributed modules... Remove all old files and directories ... oh, Gosh!) Upgrading to a new version of WordPress is a breeze if we have well design themes and plugins, much easier than other CMS, thanks to the great WordPress architecture design.

Learning WordPress 4.0

For someone who is new to WordPress, they may want to start with the latest version. Actually if you learn WordPress 3.x well, you will find it easy to master WordPress 4.0. This is our belief. The new WordPress UI is only getting better and better and more intuitive. This is what we have been experiencing since WordPress 2.0. Just like HTML 5.0, with HTML 4 basics, things will become easier for 5.0.

WordPress 3.3.2

Do it quick before the hacker. Upgrade your WordPress as soon as you can, but you need to make sure it won't break your existing plug-ins or themes.

Better try the upgrade on your sanbox first if your production site can't be down for business. Contact us if you need our professional help.

Maintenance and Security Releases

Version 3.3.2 addressed some security issues and fixed 12 bugs. For more information, see the release notes.

Version 3.3.1 addressed a security issue and fixed 15 bugs. For more information, see the release notes.

WordPress 3.1.3

A new WordPress version 3.1.3 , a minor upgrade, was released yesterday (5/25/2011). Great job WordPress team. Keep up the good work. Thank you!

WordPress 3.1.3 was released on May 25th, and on May 31, when I tried to have a new installation of WordPress with Softaculous ( free service offered with Arvixe Hosting ), WordPress version 3.1.3 was already available! Meanwhile Fantastico's WordPress is still giving you online version 3.1 (Of course WordPress upgrade is easy with Arvixe Hosting server, but still that is extra clicks and some new WordPress users may not be aware of the necessity of upgrading to 3.1.3 in timely manner.

The bottom line is Softaculous WordPress auto installation is now more updated, easier and faster (one step compared to Fantastico three steps). Also it offers installation backup which Fantatico does not have.

WordPress 3.2

As WordPress developers, we need to prepare for WordPress 3.2 even it is still beta 1 and not recommended to run on a production web site as of this writing. WordPress 3.1 was official released on Feb. 23rd, 2011 and we heard that WordPress 3.2 release will be in June, 2011.

We need to know that the minimum system requirements for WordPress 3.2 will be: PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.  This has to be considered if you plan to upgrade and you still have some plugins or themes that are not compatible with these version of PHP and MySQL.

The PHP version of  Arvixe hosting server is higher than 5.2.9  and MySQL is higher than 5.0.9. So there should be no problem you want to transfer to their hosting service and upgrade to WordPress 3.2. If you need help in transferring your WordPress site to Arvixe, you may contact us before you sign up your hosting service and we can lead you through the whole process.

As the beta release notes remind us: "Theme and plugin authors, if you haven’t been following the 3.2 development cycle, please start now so that you can update your themes and plugins to be compatible with the newest version of WordPress."

As WordPress users, you also need to prepare yourself if you plan to have someone to help you to upgrade to WordPress 3.2 because Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be supported for the Admin. There will be an Admin GUI refresh, but that will not be a major redesign so you may still find your way around.

Great things being expected from WordPress 3.2: 1) Improved performance will make your WordPress site much faster. 2) A new default theme called Twenty Eleven, based on the popular Duster theme with rotating header images and more. 3)Distraction-free Writing

  • WordPress 3.2 Full Screen Editing
  • WordPress 3.2 Preview Video
  • WordPress 3.2 Full Screen Editing

    If you can't wait to see the WordPress3.2 Full Screen "Distraction-free Writing" mode, the above video just shows you that for your curiosity. We also show you the most ignored but useful features of "Kitchen Sink" and spell checking language options, which has been available for quite some time, even in previous WordPress versions. It is useful for people who want color text or change some text to heading 1 to heading 5, etc.

    WordPress 3.2 Preview Video

    WP89.com presents a HD (720) video on WordPress 3.2 preview:

    This is meant for those who doesn't want to install WordPress 3.2 beta version yet so they can get prepared for their upgrade.
    Something we cannot show you here: better performance.

    Next, we are going to show you the most talked about "Full Screen Editing Mode of WordPress3.2 for Distraction-free Writing"