Manas T

So I jumped off the boat and upgraded this blog to the latest and greatest WordPress version ever … version 2.5. The features were just too much for me to resist. So how does WordPress 2.5 feel compared to the previous WordPress releases ? Find out after the jump.

In case you are afraid to upgrade manually, try the Instant Upgrade plugin. It worked for me without any problem.

1. Incompatible plugins

Out of my 15 old plugins just one plugin was causing problems. It was Disable WordPress Widgets. I had never liked the idea of WordPress widgets. But no plugin update was available.

So I am now using widgets in the sidebar. A small sacrifice for using Worpress 2.5.

2. The new dashboard

WordPress 2.5 includes a fully customizable dashboard with fresh new colors and a complete redesign to make things simpler. At first looks, the new dashboard looks great but there are some downsides. The layout is not fluid, so there is a lot of space wastage in widescreen monitors. Also the colors used are a bit difficult to read on laptop screens.

The one shot solution for these problems is a new admin theme. Download and install the Fluency WordPress admin theme. Its a cool new admin theme which is compatible with WordPress 2.5. You can check out screenshots here.

3. Multi-file uploading now easy

Uploading files is now much easier. Uploading files is somewhat like Flickr now. You can select multiple files at the same time and see the progress of each file while they are uploading. Cool !

4. Automatic plugin upgrades

Now you can automatically upgrade plugins from your dashboard itself. Open the Plugin page. If there is an update available WordPress will show you. Check out the screenshot telling me there is an update available for the XML sitemaps plugin.

Click upgrade automatically and WordPress will do everything for you.

5. Built-in gallery support

Upload a bunch of photos and 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.

Check out Paul Stamatiou’s post using WordPress 2.5 Gallery support.

Thats it for now….. I am still checking out WordPress 2.5.

Tired of using multiple SEO plugins in your WordPress blog ?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an most important aspect for every blogger. It determines the way your blog posts are shown in search engine results. The better SEO you do for your blog the more traffic you get from search engines.

WordPress is a simple yet powerful blogging platform. Unfortunately it does not have  good SEO built-in. Because of this many SEO plugins exist for WordPress but all they will do is optimize only one aspect of your blog like Tile tag, or meta keywords. So if you want a more robust all-in-one solution for all the SEO needs of your blog, try WpSEO.

WpSEO : The ultimate SEO plugin for WordPress

WpSEO WordPress plugin is aimed at WordPress bloggers who would like to optimize their blog for better SEO. Installation of this plugin is same as any other plugin. Just upload it to your plugins directory and activate the plugin from you WordPress dashboard. Then you can go to Options —> WpSEO to configure how WpSEO optimizes your blog.

Though this plugin does not have an English documentation at present, everything available in the plugin options is pretty straight-forward. You can configure everything in your blog which is related to SEO by using this single plugin.

You can change the title, description, keywords tags and even export your settings in a XML file so that you can use them later. And if you want a live demo of this plugin, you can check out this blog itself. I have made changes to the title of the pages.

Try it and tell me whether you like it or not !!

Download WpSEO

Note : It is a German site.