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.