Monthly Archives: December 2005

WordPress 2.0 Duke

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Although it has been available for a few days now, WordPress 2.0 ‘Duke’ is now official.

In fact has already had been downloaded more than 33,000 times as I write this! You can download it from the revamped WordPress.org web site.

There is a lot of new code in this release, most of which is concerned with either the Administration interface, especially the WYSIWYG write interface, or under the hood stuff which will benefit plugin and theme developers. There are a whole bunch of bug fixes too.

There are some very compelling reasons to upgrade to this new version, but there are a whole bunch of reasons to hold off too: Continue reading →

WordPress Book Published

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The book!Wow! It’s hard to believe, but my first book is now a reality! Several copies of my first book — “Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress” arrived at my door this morning.

This is the book, published by Apress that I have co-authored with Robert T Douglass and Jared Smith over the last six months or so. It has long been my ambition to be published and when the opportunity presented itself earlier this year, I had to grab it with both hands. It has been quite a hard struggle; writing in a small amount of spare time is not easy, but I do think it has been worth it.

The result is six chapters on using WordPress to help build an online community. Although I wrote the book using version 1.5.x most of the WordPress chapters are version agnostic. This isn’t a “how to use WordPress” book (the excellent WordPress Codex is good for that). This is a book about how to use WordPress to help you build an online community.

You can buy the book online directly from Apress including in eBook form. You can buy from Amazon.co.uk or you can buy it from Amazon.com. I’m not sure whether it will be on the shelves of your local book store yet, but it will be over the next couple of days.

Apress have a good summary of the book (my emphasis):

Content management, blogs, and online forums are among the most significant online trends today, and Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress are three of the most popular open source applications facilitating these trends.

Drupal is a full content management system that allows you to create any type of website you desire, from an e-commerce to a community-based site. phpBB enables you to set up a bulletin board or forum. And WordPress is the software of choice for the exploding blog community. All three technologies are based on PHP and MySQL.

Jamie and I with the bookFinally, I think Jamie is quite proud of her Dad, Jan is just glad it’s finally published! I must thank them both for putting up with me while I’ve struggled through this. The next one will be easier! I have to thank Matt, Ryan, and the rest of the WordPress community, without whom I would have had nothing to write about!

WordPress Meet-up In London

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I’m looking forward to the WordPress meet-up in London tomorrow. Matt Mullenweg will be visiting the UK (for the first time?) on Friday. I’m quite excited to be meeting Matt and Podz amongst others.

There has been a conversation over at Podz’ blog about arrangements and timings.

The arrangements so far are a bit sketchy but the most concrete seems to be a meeting in Starbucks, Long Acre in Covent Garden. Though Matt is not yet confirmed to be at that one.

Here is Starbucks’ own map of the store complete with confirmation of wireless internet access!

The likelihood is that there will be another get-together in the evening. I’ll be in London from just after noon till late evening.