One of the cool features added is the theme preview. You may now preview your blog in any of the themes uploaded into your theme folder without having to activate it beforehand.
Another one is the plugin notification bubble, which shows up beside the Plugins link in the WP admin panel, when there is a new version for a certain plugin available. This feature, however, assumes you downloaded a plugin from the WP plugin directory.
Everybody of us someday discovered WordPress for blogging, then decided to download it and install it for blogging. Some of you might even have chosen to run the entire website on WordPress, making use of the software as a kind of CMS. But what happened before?
I can remember some days back I had one of my first ugly websites with an iframe. The home site contained what was supposed to be a blog entry, but I did not actually call it “blog”. When I needed to implement comments I first tried to install some service whose name I cannot remember. It did not work. Then I chose Haloscan, which was pretty easy. Back then, all the techniques related to blogging nowadays were pretty much unkown. No software, no posting, no visual editor, no blogroll. And look at how things are going now. Nobody is obliged to squish content into Iframes for easy publishing
Do you know those comments who seem pretty normal first but then grow odd when you come closer? Such as for example:
Nice blog post. Very useful. ccaajsajshkjdhjsadjkomglookatmysiteztooooooo.
Well, I suppose you know them. Most of you surely submit them to greedy Akismet which will eat them up. That is just what I have been doing. During the last weeks, I noticed an increase of spam comments on old posts from 2006. Sometimes, there is even no mail notification of such comment and they stay where they are for weeks and months. Today I finally decided to put this to an end by adding a plugin that closes posts after a certain period of time.
Close Old Posts was written by Matt Mullenweg and simply closes comments of older posts. You can upload and activate the plugin the usual way. Then click on “Edit” on the right side of the plugin description and you will see the editable source code of the plugin. The piece of code below determines the number of days after that comments are automatically closed. In this example, comments are closed on all posts older than 21 days. Adjust the number to your preference, then save your changes.
$cop_days_old = 21; // close comments after this many days
Now nobody will be able to spam your past posts:-)
To conclude, (and this is definetely off topic), I announce the moving in of a new orchid to my house, the third one actually. It was given to me today by my mom and it is so beautiful. This weekend I hope to take some photos and upload them to Flickr.
Most of us know the advantages of today’s web. A lot of media can be easily shared: photos, music and videos. Thnaks to Youtube’s embedding code you can have any video displayed upon your website or blog within seconds. But what about the code? Everytime I tried to embed the video manually, or used one of the plugins offered, the result produced various errors, and often the video was not even embedded, but only the link to the respective video was shown. Today I finally found a nice solution: WP Youtube, a plugin for WordPress. You upload it, activate it and then you can create a so called profile, defining the width of the embedded video and so on. What you get is an embedded video, that is playable AND the admin area of this plugin offers the possibility to select the option “Valid XHTML”. When selected, the code stays error-free and you will have your video embedded without any problems. Check out this video of Matt Mullenweg talking on WordCamp Dallas, for example.
