M.Y. Lessons Learnt

With nothing to do in the conference, I browsed the iPhone application store with the phone (must be an expensive way) and found the new Wordpress for iPhone was released …

The installation was easy and finished on the fly. The first problem … It created a dummy post in my blog with placeholders like !$titles$! in it. And I could not remove it thru the tool but had to go back to the online full version.

WTF … Did they test the software at all ?

Just couple of hours ago Wordpress released the latest version 2.6, and what you seeing now is the upgraded version !! Yes, I cannot stand the previous two versions because of the slow load time. And I am pleased to tell you all that this version is FAST, with a lot of new features as well.

Good stuff !!

Wordpress released the latest version 2.5 for two weeks now. So I decided to give it try, after skipping 1 or 2 upgrades in the past few months. The upgrade process was simple as usual.

• Deactivate all the plugins
• Backup the database
• Download the latest codebase, unzip and transfer to the server
• Run the upgrade.php
• Activate back the plugins

There are something I like / dislike / puzzle about this version:

• The plugin upgrade is now almost painless, very useful
• Not all plugins can work with this version, however
• The new administrator dashboard is fresh-looking, but need sometime to get used to. For example, I don’t like the categories section in New Post screen is now underneath the text box, but not on the right hand side
• Somehow, two files were mixed up - plugins.php and post-new.php. Click the plugins function links to the New Post page and vise versa (!). I have to re-download the files, not sure what went wrong
• The new engine is super slow !!

Finally integrated the SlideShowPro with WordPress to show my photos around the world … never know it is so difficult to make it work. My advise is:

• Install the Kimili Plugin for WordPress and activate it;
• Install the SlideShowPro in a dedicated directory, I made it work under /wp-content/;
• Make sure the image and music paths in the SlideShowPro XML file are correct - use absolute paths if needed;
• Insert the Kimili line in your blog post carefully, don’t use the Visual editor …;
• If all failed, try MonoSlideShow

Enjoy … here is the photo gallery (you can also click the “Gallery” link in the top of the page).