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WordPress 2.7 installed and I’m liking it

The release of WP 2.7 is scheduled for the 10th and I’ve already installed RC1 and have been thoroughly impressed so far. The admin area and menus have been completely overhauled and the results are great. I highly recommend the upgrade.

The update also added nice stuff that was previously accomplished with plugins. The Dashboard is a lot more customizable now. Plugins can now be installed from within WordPress by either searching the Extend repository or uploading a zip. You can also delete plugins too so that eliminates most of the need for FTP access.

I updated my plugins to be compatible with 2.7 so grab those updates.

I’m also getting ready to start building up my photo gallery at Picasa and sticking to an organization system that works. Picasa 3 is a very nice piece of software to help accomplish that.

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WordPress plugin popularity

If you subscribe to my comments feed you probably see all the comments related to my plugins. Over the past 2  years I’ve had a thousand comments and probably at least another thousand emails exchanged with WordPress users. I must have found a pretty good niche with my ordering plugins considering My Page order hit the second page in the list of Popular plugins on the WordPress Extend site. There’s about 2000 plugins on the site and I’m coming in at around #19. That’s pretty sweet.

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Post Shared Google Reader items in WordPress

You might be wondering what these “Shared” posts are. Most of my web surfing consists of reading my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, all 146 of them. On a given day I might find one or two things that I think other people would want to read. Google Reader lets you share items with your “friends”, but there’s no way to have a discussion about the content.

A while back I was trying to figure out a way to share those “shared” items with a wider audience. I stuck a link in the sidebar to my shared item page, but I doubt anybody uses it. What I really wanted to do was have WordPress automatically create posts with a link to the content I mark in Google Reader. The WP-o-matic plugin does exactly what I want.

Setting up the plugin involves creating a CRON job on the server and setting up a feed to check periodically. You can customize the content of the post that gets created; I opted for a little blurb and a link to the content. I wanted to modify the title that gets created which isn’t an available option so I modified the plugin to do that for me. I also set it to save posts as drafts so I can assign a category and tags and maybe some of my thoughts before Google Reader gets a hold of it and caches it forever.

So these shared posts are really the cream of the crop of my subscriptions and I’d love to have people share things they find. I like the fact that whenever shared items show up in Google Reader from my friends they are of high quality and worth the read even though it might be outside my immediate area of interest.