Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.

Digging in further you might notice that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen. If your screen is narrow and the menu is taking up too much horizontal room, click the arrow to minimize it to be icon-only, and then go to the write page and drag and drop everything from the right column into the main one, so your posting area is full-screen. (For example I like hiding everything except categories, tags, and publish. I put categories and tags on the right, and publish under the post box.)

It’s all about you. It’s the next generation of WordPress, which is why we’ve bestowed it with the honor of being named for John Coltrane. And you can download it today.

Last, but certainly not least, this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.

(As with any interface change it may take a little bit of time to acclimate yourself but soon you’ll find yourself whizzing through the screens. Even people who have hated it at first tell us after a few days they wonder how they got by before.)

The Story Behind 2.7

The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.

For some of the back story in the development of 2.7, check out these blog posts (thanks to WeblogToolsCollection for the list):

• Usability Testing Report: 2.5 and CrazyHorse
• The New 2.7 Dashboard
• The Visual Design of 2.7
• WordPress 2.7 wireframes
• Comprehensive Codex Article on WordPress 2.7
• WordPress Development Updates from Jane Wells
• WordPress Usability Testing in New York
• WordPress 2.7 UI Configurability from Ryan Boren
• Customizable Post Editing Screen from Mark Jaquith
• WordPress 2.7 Navigation Survey from Jane Wells
• Shortcuts/Favorites Menu from Jane Wells
• CrazyHorse Presentation at WordCamp SF
• WordPress 2.7 Walkthrough by Matt
• WordPress 2.7 and beyond from Matt at WordCamp Utah

This was interesting to us, a blogging software release we actually blogged about, but the process was hugely informative. Prior to its release today Crazyhorse and 2.7 had been tested by tens of thousands of people on their blogs, hundreds of thousands of you count .com. The volume of feedback was so high that we decided to push back the release date a month to take time to incorporate it all and do more revisions based on what you guys said.

For those of you wondering why we didn’t call this release 3.0, it’s because we abhor version number inflation. 3.0 will just be the next release after 2.9. The major features in new point releases approach also works well for products like OS X, with huge changes between a 10.3 and 10.4.

The Future

Those of you following along at home might have noticed this was our second major redesign of WordPress this year. Whoa nelly! While that wasn’t ideal, and I especially sympathize with those of you creating books or tutorials around WordPress, there’s good news. The changes to WordPress in 2.5 and 2.7 were necessary for us to break free of much of the legacy cruft and interface bloat that had built up over the years (gradually) and more importantly provide us with a UI framework and interface language we can use at the foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before. So at the end of 2009 I expect, interface-wise, WordPress to look largely the same as it does now.

That said, we couldn’t be more excited about the future with regards to features. Now that we’ve cleared out more basic things, we are looking forward in the coming year to really tackling media handling including audio and video, better tools for plugin and theme developers, widgets, theme updates, more integrated and contextual help, and easier integration with projects like BuddyPress and bbPress.”

Matt Mullenweg. WordPress.org

We think RC1 is ready for everyone to try out.  Please download RC1 and help us make the final release the best it can be.  As always, back up your blog before upgrading.”

Ryan Boren. WordPress.org

Download WordPress 2.7 RC1 »

Download BlueSense Adsense Ready WordPress Theme »

A very fast loading and search engine optimized Adsense Ready WordPress Theme, BlueSense is specifically designed for all types of niche websites and will suit a wide variety of content and user preferences.

Built for heavy monetization with Adsense, the entire theme’s colors are perfectly blended with Adsense units on both homepage and single post pages for a maximum click through rate.

Other classic features of this Adsense Ready Theme:

• Separate Ad Blocks with easy editing and insertion of Adsense code. These ad blocks can also be used to insert other types of advertisements as well.
• Ease of use and convenience. You just need to insert your Adsense publisher ID in the existing ad units and you’re ready to go. It only takes 20 seconds to set up BlueSense perfectly.
• Well blended link units within the horizontal menu bar attracts navigational-style clicks from most visitors.
• Optimized Ads on the single post page. This includes a 468 x 60 Banner across the top of the post, a wide 160 x 600 skyscraper beside the post and a 336 x 280 rectangle below the post.
• Adsense unit colors are already blended with blog link and text colors. No need to pick and match colors on your part.
• Search Engine Optimized and dynamic individual page titles, which places your keyword post titles before the blog name.
• Compatible with WordPress 2.0+ and above.

Important User Notes

Remember to change the Publisher ID for the default Adsense units after you upload the theme! You’ll need to get your publisher id (e.g. pub-xxxxxx) and insert this in all the Adsense units, which are found in the following files:

For Single Post Pages:

• Single_bottom_adverts.php – (336 x 280 Rectangle)
• Single_top_adverts.php – (468 x 60 Banner)

For Link Unit in the Menu Bar:

• Header_adverts.php – (Link units)

Customizing the Header with your own Banner

To insert your own header image, you need to take the following steps:

1. Go to your stylesheet (style.css) and look for this “#header“. You should see the following code:

   padding-top: 0px;
   background: #ffffff
   height: 130px;

2. Insert this code (in bold): url(’header.jpg’) top center no-repeat; right after “background: #ffffff ” on the same line.
3. The new header section should look like this (The new code is highlighted in bold).:
   margin-bottom: 0px;
   margin-top: 0px;
   text-align: center;
   padding-top: 0px;
   background: #ffffff url(’header.jpg’) top center no-repeat;
   height: 130px;
4. The header image that you want to use must be uploaded to the same folder as the other theme files and should be named ‘header.jpg‘
5. The header image size should be 815 (width) x 130 (height) but you can easily change the height of the image.

This theme is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license and requires you to keep the author’s credit link.

Download BlueSense Adsense Ready WordPress Theme »

[Via: Dosh Dosh]

• Nice admin area with live ad preview
• Add as many co-authors as you desire
• Simple add/edit/delete/reset co-authors
• Fast insert your ads in you posts and pages
• “Show all” feature to insert one ad at the end of every post

Download: AdSense Revenue Sharing 1.2 »

Do you have a blog you run that is authored by multiple authors? If so, have you wondered how you can run a revenue sharing program so that everyone is equally compensated? Has the thought about coding a plugin given you the creeps? Well, no more. I have done all the hard work. Announcing Adsense Author Pro, a free adsense revenue sharing plugin for wordpress.

AdSense Revenue Sharing is a wordpress plugin which allows you to easy display ads in your posts by using a quicktag and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors.

To dispaly the ads you can either insert <!–adsense–> anywhere in your post or use the quicktag button.
For configuration go to Options>Revenue Sharing

Usage:

1. Download, unzip, copy adsense-revenue-sharing directory to your plugin folder.
2. Go to your wordpress admin panel, click on Plugins and activate Adsense Revenue Sharing.
3. Go to Options > Revenue Sharing and configure the plugin.
   1. Top left is a default publisher id. Delete it or modify it with your own.
   2. Add other publisher codes from your co-authors if available.
   3. Edit the adsense ad setting (border, color etc); do not fill the ad channel if you added more than one publisher id.
   4. Select yes or no for the All pages option.
4. Click Update AdSense Settings.

How it works:

There are two ways you can use this plugin.

1. You can use the quicktag and insert an ad wherever you want in your post.
2. Second, you can use the All pages setting.

By choosing number 2 one add will appear at the end of every single post and page.

By using either one of the above, on the pages that have more than one post like main page or the archive page, only the first post on the page will display one ad. Google only lets you display 3 ads at a time so it`s better t show one ad than to show 3 ads and 4 to 7 empty spaces.

Using two or more authors at once, everyone will get equal ad exposure. So if there are 2 authors, each of then will get 50%. For 4 authors the percentage will be 25% for each and so on. Every time the page loads a different author id will be used to display the ad/ads. Remember due to google only one publisher id is allowed to be used on a page. So if you want to add other ads in your design read the google TOS first, you will have to disable the plugin or use only one publisher id with it.

Remember if you have 2 or more publishers, the one with less hits will be displayed.

EX.: 5 publishers, someone visits the website and the id from no.1 is shown; for the next 4 visits no.1 will not be shown, meaning that the other 4 will be, randomly; now the hit count is equal again and the pub. no.1 will be shown again; every id will be shown once every 5 hits.

If you want to add another authors publisher id and you already have one or more, either reset the other publishers hit count, or insert and equal number with the current hit count of the existing ones to the newly added. If you don`t, the next thing will happen:

Ex.: you have 8 publishers and each of them has 1000 hits; you add another one with 0 hits. If you don`t reset the hit count for the other 8 or insert 1000 as the new publishers hit value, ads with his id will show up until he reaches 1000 hits.

Features:

• Nice admin area with live ad preview
• Add as many co-authors as you desire
• Simple add/edit/delete/reset co-authors
• Fast insert your ads in you posts and pages
• “Show all” feature to insert one ad at the end of every post

Requires:

• WordPress: 2.3 or higher

Compatible up to:

• WordPress: 2.5.1

Release info:

• Date: October 16th, 2007
• Version: 1.0
• Date: October 24th, 2007
• Version: 1.1
• Date: April 23rd, 2008
• Version: 1.2

Installation:

1. Unzip the downloaded package and upload the AdSense Revenue Sharing folder into your WordPress plugins folder
2. Log into your WordPress admin panel
3. Go to Plugins and “Activate” the plugin. “Revenue Sharing” will now be displayed in your Options section
4. Set up as many AdSense Account ID`s under Options -> Revenue Sharing
5. Edit your Ad options under under Options -> Revenue Sharing

Features in version 1.1

1. Fixed add hit count
2. Fixed ad preview
   • Once you click outside the field you edited the preview will be updated. Once you save it, it will show the new data.
3. Fixed multiple post page display
   • Pages that show more than one post like main page, archive page, search page will only display ads in the latest
     post added on the certain page (first post on page)
4. Added smart ad count
   • If you accidentally enter more than 3 quicktags in a post it ignores them and ads one ad at the end of the post.
     Same thing happens on multiple post pages.
5. Added new option ->Show all
   • If you enable this option all the quicktags you added will be ignored and one ad will be placed at the end of every
     post/page. When you disable this options ads will be shown again only in posts that have a quicktag.

New in version 1.2

1. Fixed it to work with wp 2.5
2. Added new option ->Position
   • You can now choose where to place the ad when the “Show all” function is on, i.e.: top, bottom, top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right.

[Via Silence is everything]

Download: AdSense Revenue Sharing 1.2 »

If your WordPress blog uses AdSense, and you love Firefox you will love this plugin. Makes you money and makes the web a better place. When a user downloads and installs Firefox through your referral, we’ll credit your account with up to $1.00 (more details »).

.

Description

AskApache Firefox Adsense is a simple plugin that displays a Firefox AdSense Ad (Google Referrals) on your blog.

The cool thing is that it will only show the ad to users that are not using Firefox, and only to users running Windows. Those are the requirements to getting paid by Google, and it doesn’t show the Ad to the intelligent people already using Firefox (or running linux/non-windows).

Google:

Firefox plus Google Toolbar: When a user you’ve referred to Firefox plus Google Toolbar runs Firefox for the first time, you’ll receive up to US$1 in your account, depending on the user’s location. Your referral must be a Windows user, who has not previously installed Firefox, in order for you to receive credit.

Installation

1. Upload aa-firefox-adsense.zip to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Unzip into its own folder /wp-content/plugins/aa-firefox-adsense/aa-firefox-adsense.php
3. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress by clicking “AskApache Firefox Adsense”
4. Go to your Options Panel and open the “AskApache Firefox Adsense” submenu. /wp-admin/options-general.php?page=aa-firefox-adsense.php
5. Enter in your google firefox adsense code and hit the “Update Values” Button.
6. Add the code on your pages by including <?php if(function_exists(‘aa_firefox_ad’))aa_firefox_ad();?> in your templates (1 per page, 1 ad per page).

Download: AskApache Firefox Adsense Plugin »

[via AskApache.com]

Version 2.5.1 of WordPress is now available. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration. The vulnerability is not public but it will be shortly.

In addition to the security fix, 2.5.1 contains many bug fixes. If you are interested only in the security fixes, you can download these corrected copies of wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php, and wp-admin/media.php. Replace your existing copies of these files with these new copies.

If you download the entire 2.5.1 release, you will be getting over 70 other fixes. 2.5.1 focuses on fixing the most annoying bugs and improving performance. Here are some highlights:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Secret lives of blogs

Since 2.5 your wp-config.php file allows a new constant called SECRET_KEY which basically is meant to introduce a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. (It’s unique and random on every page load.) Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.

Many thanks to Steven Murdoch for responsibly reporting the security issue (CVE-2008-1930) and Alex Concha for reporting an XSS issue.

[via WordPress.org]

Download the newest version of WordPress »

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

For a short overview of the features with screenshots, it’d be best to visit our sneak peek announcement for RC1. Or check out a 4-minute screencast of the new interface in action. If you just want to jump straight to the good stuff here’s where you can find 2.5 upgrade and download information.

If you want to see everything I would grab a cup of coffee or a mojito, because this post is epic.

User Features

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — we’ve worked hard to take your feedback about what’s most important in the dashboard and organize things to allow you to focus on what’s important — your blog — and get out of your way. In collaboration with Happy Cog and the community we’ve taken the first major step forward in the WordPress interface since version 1.5.

Dashboard Widgets — the dashboard home page is now a series of widgets, including ones to show you fun stats about your posting, latest comments, people linking to you, new and popular plugins, and of course WordPress news. You can customize any of the dashboard widgets to show, for example, news from your local paper instead of WP news. Plugins can also hook in, for example the WordPress.com stats widget adds a handy double-wide stats box.

Multi-file upload with progress bar — before when you would upload a large file you’d wait forever, never knowing how far along it was. And uploading more than one photo was an exercise in patience, as you could only do one at a time. Now you can select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.

Bonus: EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template. If you use the EXIF title fields or similar those will be put into their equivalent fields in WP. Most modern digital cameras generate EXIF data.

Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too, a great boon for those using WordPress as a CMS. New themes can style or sort pages differently in results.

Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.

Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.

Concurrent editing protection — for those of you on multi-author blogs, have you ever opened a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other, irrecoverably losing hours of work? I bet that added a few words to your vocabulary. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done. You’ll see a message like below.

Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory since 2.3 we’ve told you when they have an update available. Now we take that to the next logical step — downloading and installing the upgrade for you. This is dependent a little bit on your host setup, and it may ask you for your FTP password much like OS X or Windows will ask you for a password, but it works well on majority of hosts we were able to test, your mileage may very, plugins in mirror may be larger than they appear.

Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.

Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, we have a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos. I’ve been using this feature on my blog and have already uploaded over 1,200 pictures into 23 galleries. The shortcode has some hidden options too, check out this documentation.

Developer Features

Now for the geeky stuff. While we’re excited about the above features, each one represents a new opportunity or API for other developers to take to another level. (The best of which we’ll someday integrate back into WP.)

Salted passwords — we now use the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, which makes brute-forcing them impractical. If you use something like mod_auth_mysql we’ve created a plugin that will allow you to use legacy MD5 hashing. (The hashing is completely pluggable.) Users will automatically switch to the more secure passwords next time they log in.

Secure cookies — cookies are now encrypted based on the protocol described in this PDF paper. which is something like user name|expiration time|HMAC( user name|expiration time, k) where k = HMAC(user name|expiration time, sk) and where sk is a secret key, which you can define in your config.

Easy taxonomy and URL creation — probably best illustrated with an example: I can call register_taxonomy() with a few arguments to register a “people” taxonomy and whenever I edit an image I’ll see a UI like tags has for identifying the people in a photo, and these will be URL addressable with /person/firstname-lastname/. All with a single function call.

Inline documentation — the vast majority of the new code going into WordPress include inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.

Database optimization — we haven’t changed the table layout in this release, which is one of the reasons so many plugins work fine with 2.5. We have added a few new indicies and made a few default fields more flexible based on some bottlenecks we found on WordPress.com, which now hosts 2.7 million WordPress blogs. It should be invisible to the application, just a bit faster on the database side.

$wpdb->prepare() — now almost all of the SQL in WordPress is prepared first, and the same functions are available to your plugins. This should prevent elementary SQL escaping issues.

Media buttons — the add media buttons above the post are both expandable, so you could have an “Add Google Map” button if you like, They can be overridden, so if you think you can do the video or audio tab better than we have you can replace the default.

Shortcode API — the new gallery functionality is powered by the new shortcode API. Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. They give users a short, easy to type and copy/paste string they can move around their post without worrying about messing up complex HTML or embed codes. The Shortcode API is fully documented.

Now you see why 2.5 took a little extra time.

Upgrade Notes

2.5 does include security fixes so it is recommended for all users, the 2.3 branch will no longer be updated. The upgrade instructions for this version are pretty much the same as any other version. The most important thing to check is your plugins, so if for example everything works except the new uploader, a legacy plugin might be causing a javascript error on the page and breaking it. If something goes wrong, the safest thing to do is turn your plugins off (we have a button to do them all at once, now) and turn them back on one-by-one, testing the problem along the way. This has solved almost everybody’s problems in testing, and it also lets you know which plugin author to show some love to so they’ll update their plugin, and which plugin authors already have so you can shower them with praises on your blog.

One brief note about some of the new upload and plugin upgrade features, there are some edge-case hosting platforms, like versions of Lighttpd before 1.5 or over-agressive mod_security rules, which can break. If something isn’t working like it was looked in the screenshot, ask your host if there’s something on the server side which may be interfering. Hosts, feel free to join and post to our wp-testers mailing list if you have an environment that requires some extra code to work around. We’d be happy to include it in the next update.

Quick tip: in 2.5 you click the name of things to edit them, like your username to edit your profile or the title of a post to edit it.

The Community is Growing

More than growing, it’s on fire. We always talk about things like downloads, and the 2.3 branch has already had 1.92 million downloads as I write this post, but this time we have some far more interesting information I’d like to share.

There were over 1,200 commits to our repository since 2.3.0 and over 90 people were credited in them. This means in our core code, not plugins, there were at least 90 individual folks that contributed something high-quality enough that it made the cut to be part of the download you guys get today. I had no idea this group of people was so large.

Outside of the core commit team, there was particular help from these people, in rough order of number of credits and tickets: mdawaffe (Michael Adams), azaozz (Andrew Ozz), nbachiyski (Nikolay Bachiyski), andy (Andy Skelton), iammattthomas (Matt Thomas), tellyworth (Alex Shiels), josephscott (Joseph Scott), lloydbudd (Lloyd Budd), DD32 (Dion), filosofo (Austin Matzko), hansengel (Hans Engel), pishmishy, ffemtcj, Viper007Bond, ionfish (Benedict Eastaugh), jhodgdon (Jennifer Hodgdon), Otto42, thee17 (Charles E. Free-Melvin), and xknown. Also want to thank MichaelH and Lorelle on the documentation side, and moshu, Kafkaesqui, whooami, MichaelH, Otto42, and jeremyclark13 for helping with support.

The 2.5 branch is nicknamed “Brecker” in honor of Michael Brecker, an exceptionally talented saxophonist who could cross styles effortlessly and never stopped experimenting and pushing himself until he passed away last year.

New WordPress.org

All of this wasn’t enough, so in our copious spare time we decided to redesign WordPress.org to better match the aesthetics of the new dashboard and also to spruce up a few areas that needed lovin’. Some parts of the site, like the Codex, might show the old style for a day or two. We know, just give us a bit of time. Thanks to Matt Thomas for his epic effort in designing and coding the new site.

What’s Next

As always with WordPress, we don’t claim any of these features to be perfect, or to be better than everyone else in the world, but they are done by and for the people and the one thing we do promise is that with every release we listen and do our best to improve.

2.5 is a major milestone for WordPress not because it added dozens of user-requested features, but because it reaffirms that we’re as passionate about blogging as the day we started. Our community is too fierce to rest on its laurels — contrary to what pundits claim, blogging is far from “finished” and every improvement just whets our appetite for more. And more is coming.

It’s a good thing WordPress doesn’t limit the length of posts, because this one would have hit it. If you made it this far, thanks for sharing a bit of your day with us. I sincerely hope this new version of WordPress helps you do what you love to do.

[via WordPress.org]

Download the newest version of WordPress »

via ProAffiliateIncome.com

“There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is WordPress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing WordPress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your WordPress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With WordPress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your WordPress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can be a pain in the ass. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With WordPress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating. With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With WordPress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend WordPress to far beyond just a blogging platform. The talk today is about using WordPress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content!

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With WordPress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of WordPress (not WordPress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both WordPress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with WordPress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that WordPress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With WordPress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using WordPress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go WordPress, you don’t go back.”

[via ProAffiliateIncome.com]

It also increased banner blindness by keeping the ads in the same place time after time.

My new Adsense Injection plugin just takes a random paragraph (or br tag) break in your article and inserts adsense code. It does one per story on multi-post pages (home, archive, category) and let’s you pick how many to show on single post pages. It lets you pick how many total ads to show at any time as well (0-3) and it lets you set the formats and colors you want it to randomly select from.

I’m using it on this blog if that gives you an idea of how it works.

Version 2.0 Let’s you show YPN ads as well as Google, although I can’t test it because they wouldn’t give me an account in their precious beta launch. : (

If you want to keep ads from displaying on specific posts, use the tag in the post HTML somewhere. I do that on a few posts on this site. Go look for them. It’s like a treasure hunt where no one wins!

If you want to keep ads from displaying above a certain point in a post, use the tag in the post HTML where you want it to start.

Here’s an example of how to fill out the Adsense Injection Options page. Use your own adsense ID.”

Read more on the official site »

Download: Adsense Injection v. 2.0

[via BiggNuts.com]

Also, there is a vulnerability in the WP-Forum plugin that is being actively exploited right now. If you are using this plugin, please remove it until an update is available from its author.

Since we are talking security, remember to use strong passwords and change them regularly.  While you’re updating WP and your plugins, consider refreshing your passwords.

[via WordPress.org]