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.

Some of the exciting new features in WordPress 2.5 are an all new customizable dashboard, support for multi-file upload, one-click plugin upgrades, faster load times, built-in galleries and much more. The WordPress.org site has also been redesigned and it looks marvellous with the new colors and design.

But before you upgrade, make sure you have the latest back-up of your blog. Also its better if you upgrade all your plugins to make sure you there are no incompatibility problems. Unlike previous releases, this WordPress upgrade involves some database changes too. So make sure you follow the official WordPress instructions while upgrading.

I just finished upgrading to WordPress 2.5 thanks to the WordPress Instant Upgrade plugin and the screenshot you see above is of my all new dashboard. All my plugins seem to be working fine so far too. Just one gripe though, the new WordPress dashboard design is not fluid in design and looks out of sorts on my widescreen laptop.

So are you upgrading your WordPress blog to 2.5 ?

Download WordPress 2.5

The official announcement

The Yahoo! Shortcuts powered WordPress plugin is an easy way for you to enrich blog posts with great content (maps, finance quotes, news headlines, Flickr photos, and much more.) As you compose your blog post, the Shortcuts plugin looks for content related to what you are writing about. A Shortcut may lead your reader to a finance quote for a public company, a map of a point of interest, a Flickr image, or information about specific companies, products, and people. When it finds relevant content, it lets you know.

The process is simple. You just upload the plugin and activate it from your Dashboard. Next time you will write a blog post, you will see a new box on the right hand side which will say something like “4 Shortcuts Found”. Click “Review this post”. You will be taken to a page where you can see all shortcuts that have been found. There you can insert the shortcuts you want.

You can add Flickr images too which will be shown at the bottom. All the images are also Creative Commons licensed. You need not worry about the copyright !

As simple as that. So try Yahoo! Shortcuts today and liven up your blog posts.

Visit Yahoo! Shortcuts

Via – Digital Inspiration

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.

The problem arises in WordPress 2.3 mainly due to incompatible plugins and themes. Some of the plugins which cause this error in WordPress 2.3 are :

• Google Sitemaps Generator older than 3.0 (Download new version here)
• Posts by Author plugin
• Ultimate Tag Warrior

So if you are getting the same error then try upgrading your plugins. It might solve the problem.

If the problem still exists then you can see this WordPress support thread.

The most major of the new features are :

• Inclusion of an in-built tagging system for posts
• Automatic notification if plugin upgrade is available
• Better SEO
• Advanced editing options in post editor

So many features ! How can one stay behind in upgrading to WordPress 2.3. I have already upgraded to version 2.3 using the nifty WordPress Instant Upgrade plugin.

So have you upgraded to WordPress 2.3 ?

WordPress 2.3 Release Notes || Download WordPress 2.3