WordPress 2.5

Fr. Gareth asks asks how people are finding the new and shiny WordPress 2.5. Basically I like it. I’ve managed to find everything I need so far. The new Media Library thingy and the the “Add media” buttons in the editor are a big plus. The visual editor feels rather more solid than before.

I duly upgraded The Parish of Elmdon. In fact, I decided to be very brave and used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to do the needful. A few minutes later everything was shiny and new, and (so far as I have been able to tell so far…) working just fine.

For the record, the parish site is currently using the following plugins:

• Add meta tags 1.6
• Akismet 2.1.4
• cformsII 8.02
• FAlbum 0.7.1
• FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3
• Flickr Manager 1.5.5
• My own Forthcoming Events widget
• Google XML Sitemaps 3.0.3.1
• iCal Events 1.12
• WordPress Admin Bar 2.0.5
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade 1.1

which is more than enough for one site.

 

FeedBurner email updates and Timezones

Over at The Parish of Elmdon we’re now using FeedBurner for our feeds. Good stuff, and the email updates are a nice touch for those who haven’t quite been converted to using a proper feed reader quite yet. (Sign up for our email updates!) Just one thing: the emails give the post timestamps in CDT:

Umm, I’m actually not in the US central time zone, I’m pretty close to the Greenwich Meridian. A glance at the source for our feed shows no CDT nonsense. Reading the FeedBurner fora, this has been a known issue for nearly a year.

Come on, FeedBurner! Some of us live outside North America. It’s true.

 

Another nice WordPress church site

Dave Walker has been working on a nice WordPress-based site at The Parish of Langdon Hills. I do like the Weddings and Baptisms pages – need something along those lines on our site. And while I’m still quite fond of the See You at the Beach theme we’re using, the drop-down menus on the Langdon Hills site do a better job of revealing the site content. I wonder how hard it will be to retro-fit some drop-down menus?

For some reason our site is currently unable to retrieve the Google calendar feed that its event listing uses. Fortunately it’s cached, and I’ve adjusted things to keep it in the cache for 7 days to give me time to look into the problem. Not especially impressed with the stability of our current web host right now.

 

WordPress.com vs wordpress.org

It’s an interesting experience having two blogs running on related but slightly different software. Here we’re on WordPress MU, the less-tweakable, multi-user version. Over at The Parish of Elmdon we’re running the single-user but infinitely configurable version. The latter is admirable for that project – it’s wonderful being able to find natty plugins that do pretty much whatever you like, or to be able to write your own for the rare circumstances where there isn’t anything just so.

On the other hand this version, with less tweakability, I end up posting on rather more. That said, with September now officially underway things are starting to happen again at church so I need to extract the relevant stuff from the notice sheets.

 

Snap Preview must die

Surely the most annoying thing since, well, since the last really annoying thing. What were they thinking of? Duly disabled.

 

A little poke around the control panel, sorry, dashboard

I feel better for having changed the “Weeks in the calendar should start on” setting to Sunday rather than Monday.