Matt's Blog

WordPress 2.3 has been released and includes some major new features!

One of the more popular new features is Tagging. WordPress now allows you to add tags to your posts. Tags are best used in conjunction with Categories, so you can describe a post, without having hundreds of Categories. Tags are also used by services like Technorati. You can learn how to add Tags to your current theme here.

Another awesome new feature is the Update System. WordPress automat(t)ically checks to see if there’s a new version of WordPress and if there’s new version of your Plugins (assuming the Plugin is hosted on WP.org’s Plugin Database) and will let you know. If there’s a new version of WordPress available, it’ll say it somewhere in your Admin panel (if the user logged in has permissions to edit options). If there’s a new version of a Plugin available, it’ll say right under the plugin on your Plugins page.

Some other smaller (but just as cool) features are:

• The default links in the Blogroll are no longer those of the main developers Blogs, they are now useful and relevant to WordPress
• On the dashboard, the Incoming Links are no longer from Technorati, they’re now from Google Blog Search
• There’s been some cool changes to the Permalink system, go can see the changes in the this comment on the Trac ticket. Including enforcing either www. or no www.
• If you change the slug of a post, the old slug will redirect to the new one
• New “Pending Review” Post Status added. Useful for if you have multiple writers on your Blog and you want to review posts before they’re published
• Improved Post and Draft Management (using filters)

Unfortunately, the BrowseHappy logo is still in the Admin panel. Oh, well, maybe in 2.4…

Since there’s been some file reorganizing, you should delete all WordPress files (except the folder and content of wp-content and wp-config.php) and then upload the files for WordPress 2.3. Other than that, the upgrade process is the same as always. Don’t forget to backup your Blog and it’s database before upgrading!

Download WordPress 2.3

Have you ever wanted to post some code onto your WordPress blog, but then quickly get frustrated when it gets formatted properly? I have, a lot. I also wanted syntax highlighting. To try to solve these problems, I was using WP-Syntax. Sure, it did syntax highlighting, but if you wanted the code to be presented well, you had to do some CSS magic, and I still got frustrated when my code got formatted.

Well, WordPress.com solved this problem. They made it easy to do, presented the code well and your code doesn’t get formatted. Oh, sure, but what about self-hosted WordPress blogs?

Well, it wasn’t long before somebody made a plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs that did exactly the same thing. Viper007Bond threw together a plugin that did what WordPress.com blogs could do. Then, Matt Mullenweg saw Viper’s post and said that they should work together, and sent over the code he was using on WordPress.com. That’s how the WordPress plugin SyntaxHighlighter was born.

To use it, you just wrap your code in [sourcecode language=’lang’] and [/sourcecode] tags. Where lang is, would be one of the following currently supported languages:

• cpp
• csharp
• css
• delphi
• java
• jscript
• php
• python
• ruby
• sql
• vb
• xml

You can also use source or code instead of sourcecode, and lang instead of language. You can even not type in language or lang. So, the shortest would be [code=’lang’][…][/code].

The visitor is then presented with a clean little box with the code in it. The code is highlighted, there’s line numbers, the visitor can view the code in plain text (no highlighting), copy the code to the clipboard and print the code. Here’s a live example (click here if you’re reading this as a Feed):

<?php
if ($x == "1") {
echo "1";
}
else {
echo "2";
}
?>

It uses Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter to highlight and present the code front-end using JavaScript. Which also means, that it will degrade nicely if it’s being read in a Feed, or if the visitor doesn’t have JavaScript on/doesn’t have a browser that supports JavaScript.

It’s a great plugin that does what it supposed to do, and does it well. Check it out, if you like to post code on your WordPress blog, without any hassles.