Raj Dash

Are you tired of the boring old WordPress blog you’ve set up? The platform does have CMS capabilities, as 48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress proved, so you can create some pretty powerful websites and web applications. To do this, use a powerful but relatively underused WordPress feature known as Custom Fields, which allows you to add “meta” information for each post page and manipulate it with bits of HTML/ PHP code and WordPress functions.

Reasons To Use Custom Fields

You create a custom field, then choose on a post by post basis what information you will add. That information can be manipulated by custom WP/PHP code to present additional textual or visual content when a visitor views a post page. To summarize:

1. Add metadata for reporting or other purposes.
2. Add visually cohesive elements to your site.
3. Manipulate information and control its display programmatically.
4. Make global changes across all your posts with a single code change, instead of manually updating each post.

The lists below show some ways that WP custom fields can be used to provide more textual and visual info to your site visitors. If you decide to change something, say a border or background or even placement on the post page, without custom fields you would have to make changes manually to each and every post. If you have hundreds of posts, you’d have a daunting task. With custom fields, you have structure and homogeneity through custom handler code.

WP Custom Field Applications – Quick List

Here’s a quick list of possible applications for custom fields and handler code, provided for easy scanning. The same list is repeated below with details.)

1. Add personal info.
2. Use post expiration dates.
3. Show navigation links for article series.
4. Add text callouts in posts.
5. Embed relevant affiliate ads in product reviews.
6. Add a thumbnail to each post.
7. Show a thumbnail gallery.
8. Highlighted/ feature content.
9. Asides or mini-blog.
10. Add post icons.
11. Add category icons.
12. Portfolio or themes gallery.
13. Provide a map, possibly floated.
14. Show a related video/ video thumbnail.
15. Add a slideshow.
16. Insert an MP3 player.
17. Add author info box.
18. Log post metadata content.
19. Create a freelance invoicing log book.
20. Accounts payable log book for web publishers.
21. Real estate leads log book.
22. Show bibliography/ references/ footnotes.
23. Provide a timeline.
24. Website ad handler.
25. Contact management.
26. CD/DVD/ print media collection log.
27. File attachments.
28. Hide premium content for paid users.

Some things to keep in mind:

1. Custom fields are used for storing information that you’ll (typically) use en masse in most/all of your post pages. You will be handling custom field values the same way for each post – whether that’s to display content or produce a report elsewhere. Since you can store text, code, URLs, they provide the basis for some robust applications.
2. You can use a custom field key more than once in the same post.
3. WordPress does update your site’s database in order to store custom field information. Most of the applications above do not require any additional manual database table changes, but some may.

WP Custom Field Applications – Detailed List

This is the same list as above, but with explanations of usage. Everything is based on either real online examples or on an educated guess. Links to examples or how-to articles are provided when available. (Note: A “key” is the name of a custom field. A “value” is a key’s value, which can be text, code, or a URL. “Handler code” is the code block of HTML/ PHP/ WP functions that you write to manipulate your custom fields.)

1. Add personal info to a post

This is the most basic use, which is the example given in the WordPress Codex for using custom fields. Info you might add is your mood while writing a post, any books you’re currently reading, the weather, etc. You can make the presentation of this info as simple or as fancy as you like.

2. Use post expiration dates

For some sites, you may want to have a post to “expire” at a certain point. This might be for a classifieds site, job listings, event listings, or a poll. The custom field would specify the expiration date, and the handler code would simply filter out expired posts, not displaying them. (This isn’t a recommended use. It’s better in terms of search engine rankings to just leave posts as they are, or possibly apply a password after an expiration date. This way, the page does not cease to exist.)

3. Show navigation links for article series

If you write a lot of articles in series, you can use a custom field to auto-link articles in a given series. Use a custom field key such as “series name”. Choose a unique series name for each series, then use that name as the value of the key in each post.

4. Add text callouts in posts

Break up longer posts visually by displaying a fancy text callout. A custom field would contain the callout text, and the handler code would apply display style rules, including borders, font elements, positioning, etc.

5. Embed relevant affiliate ads in product reviews

If you’re profiling or reviewing a something like a book or a music CD, you can use a custom field to display an Amazon snapshot and affiliate product link. See Justin Tadlock’s custom fields article series for book reviews for an example.

6. Add a thumbnail to each post

Have a look at most “magazine style” WordPress themes (such as The Morning After) and you’ll see a block labelled “Recent Posts” or something of that sort. Usually such posts will have a small thumbnail image, square or otherwise. These thumbnails only appear (depending on the theme you’re using) when new posts pus a post out of the “feature content” block and into the “recent/ archive content” block.

7. Show a thumbnail gallery

Extend the last use by displaying a mini-gallery of related images for a given post page. Each page can have it’s own optional mini-gallery by using a comma-separated list of image URLs as the custom field key’s value. You can enhance these mini-galleries by adding a lightboxing plugin (such as Fancy Zoom, discussed previously) so that clicking on a thumbnail floats a larger image.

8. Highlighted/ feature content

The Morning After theme, mentioned above, uses a second custom field to show a “Latest Post” image. You can also use a custom field and handler code to highlight a feature post with a related image, or even to add a caption to a feature image. You can do all this either to the single most recent post, or to the X most recent posts, where you decide what X is.

9. Asides or mini-blog

The Morning After theme also has an “Asides” block, which could be used as a mini-blog. Rhymedcode has how-to articles on implementing Asides and Mini-blogs. (Note: Mini-blogs are usually shown in navigation bars and Asides are in the content area, though there are other subtle differences.)

10. Add post icons

Use a custom field to publish an icon to visually differentiate posts with special content, such as for podcasts. (In fact, you could use a custom field to also store the podcast audio file URL and control the embedding in the handler code.)

11. Add category icons

You can extend the last use, post icons, to display a consistent icon for each post in a given category. (Though if you make it a habit to apply more than one category to posts, this will complicate your coding. You’ll have to decide whether to display icons for all categories or just one, for each post.) As a potential example, have a look at Tubetorial. While those post icons were done manually using custom fields, they could have been done as category icons.

12. Portfolio or themes gallery

Gallery sites, such as ones built upon OS Designer’s WP gallery theme, and portfolio sites rely on custom fields for handling and display of the initial image thumbnails.

13. Provide a map, possibly floated

If you’re running an events listing site, store an even address in a custom field, then use a map API (such as for Google or Yahoo) to programmatically embed a map where and how you want on the event post page. With a bit extra effort, and a lightboxing plugin that can handle more than just images, you can float the map upon click or mouseover. Get even more complex by using a map API to embed custom icons related to your post page.

14. Show a related video/ video thumbnail

Have a review site and want to automatically include a single video from YouTube (or any video site with an API)? Store a keyword/ phrase in a custom field and have the handler code retrieve the video embed code for the first video in the API search results. (This doesn’t guarantee that the video will be relevant, however.)

15. Add a slideshow

In the same way that custom fields are suggested above for programmatically inserting maps or videos, if you can find a suitable web-based slideshow service with an API (such as Google AJAX Slide Show, based on their AJAX Feed API), you can embed pre-built slideshows.

16. Insert an MP3 player

Use custom fields to specify one or more MP3 URLs, to be displayed in an embedded player. (How you write the handler code will depend on which player you use and how its API is defined.)

17. Add author info box

Multi-author site publishers may want to display an author info box on each writer’s posts. Store the author name and other data in custom fields and write handler code to apply display rules. If you want to include bios but do not want to store the text in a custom field in every post, store it in a text file on your web server and use a custom field for the bio URL.

18. Log post metadata content

If you have need of tracking metadata about a post page (such as word count, time taken to write, author info, pageviews by month, revenues earned, etc.), or are just obsessive about stats, custom fields are ideal for this. You can control whether or not to display the information, based on other factors. (For example, blog network builders might use this approach to monitor writer performance.)

19. Create a freelance invoicing log book

Set up a private, password-protected WordPress. For each article or other content that you have published elsewhere (whether online or not), create an entry on your private site as a post page. Add custom field info such as the URL of the published content (if applicable), client info, fee, payment status – all of which will appear as the private post content. You can also produce a summary report for a given month and write PHP code to email the invoice to the client, or even use the PayPal API to integrate invoicing capability. (You can extend this application to log other types of freelance work, not just writing.)

20. Accounts payable log book for web publishers

This is the flipside of the last use. If you publish websites and buy your content, you can use custom fields to track author info, payment account info,  payment fee, pageview count and measurement duration (e.g., for CPM bonus payments), and payment status for each published post. This info can be used to publish a summary as necessary.

21. Real estate leads log book

Real estate agents who are listing properties can use a customized entry page to record password-protected information about potential buyers (name, contact details, offer, offer period, commission rate). To make this a real “killer” application, a listing entry form could be designed for mobile devices. (If your phone has the ability, you could even snap and upload images of the property and upload them to be displayed as a mini-gallery. Some manual text entry might be required.) All relevant info about a property listing would be stored in custom fields.

22. Show bibliography/ references/ footnotes

If you are using WordPress for publishing research content or an article library, use custom fields for the reference info, to have greater control over the presentation. For example, you might display some icon or link that when moused over would float a box with the reference info. Or you might display reference info to only specific site members.

23. Provide a timeline

SIMILE’s Timeline is a DHTML-widget for displaying a draggabale timeline visualization of related events. Freshlabs offers a WP Timeline plugin, but a custom fields approach allows you to build and display a timeline on the fly (using DHTML and Javascript code). This can be useful if your event list is being updated constantly. (It appears that you can specify events in the future.) There are many time-based applications that you can launch off of this starting point, including integrating images and/or video with timeline events, to create interactive histories or web-based tutorials. E.g., build a draggable timeline of, say, Corvette models, using either images or video from YouTube.

24. Website ad handler

This is not exactly the same as an ad rotator, but it’s similar. Devise a notation to manually specify a type of ad for each post, use a custom field to store the ad tag, and have the handler code determine which ad to display. If you want to get more complex, you can use PHP string manipulation functions to convert specific keywords into text links paid for by sponsors.

25. Contact management

Design Intellection (formerly The Design Canopy) offers a free contact manager theme for WordPress, whose functionality revolves around a set of custom fields. You can apply the same approach to produce variations.

26. CD/DVD/ print media collection log

Use a dedicated WordPress installation, possibly password-protected, to build a record of your collectible items. Each “post” would represent a single item, and the custom fields would store info such as title, format, release date, artist/actor info, and your ownership info. Use handler code to apply consistent info display rules, depending on media type. (You could also design for mobile device access, so if you’re someone that buys a lot of media, you can avoid buying duplicate items.)

27. File attachments

If you have a site where every post offers some sort of attached content (say a PDF version, or an audio file), a custom field allows you to more easily embed the content. Use a consistent filename notation, in custom fields, that easily translates converts into a file URL for the handler code to embed.

28. Hide premium content for paid users

Much of the content listed in the above uses can be included directly within a post page. However, if you are running a site with both free and paid users, you can use custom fields to hide premium content. The handler code would check to see if a visitor is logged in and a paid member. If so, the premium content would be revealed to them.

Summary

If you’re using the newly-released WP 2.5, you might know that it offers something called a shortcode API. This API lets you define macro codes in your post pages and to expand them with custom handler functions you write. While this makes WP even more powerful as an all-purpose, low-end CMS, shortcodes do not replace the full functionality of custom fields.

Note that the custom fields applications above are hardly the only ones you can create with the appropriate handler code. The idea of using custom fields is to allow the programmatic handling of information. You can synchronize this approach with a variety of web services, in order to produce far more powerful examples, to push the envelope of WordPress usage.

[Intermediate users] If you’ve seen sites like Techmeme and Megite and find them handy, you might be wishing you had something similar for a specific niche. Techmeme’s owners do have similar sites for specific niches (including politics, baseball, celeb gossip), but maybe you want something for a different niche. Since as a freelancer, I cover a number of niches on a regular basis, I’ve got my own personal dashboard tools for monitoring niches. But I’ve been on a quest to find/ build a generic tool similar to Techmeme/ Megite. Fortunately, you can produce something similar: a river of news. It doesn’t offer the topical clustering that makes Techmeme and Megite so useful, but it’s a start.

What’s a River of News, and Why Use It?

A river of news is just a stream of headlines from various websites, possibly with text excerpts. See Techmeme River for an example (a snapshot is below).

Techmeme River does not provide any item excerpts, but that doesn’t mean your river of news cannot. (However, in this post, I’m discussing a headlines-only version.) You can format the text presentation any way you like, as well as insert the information you need to appear.

Ok, Show Me How

Here is the simplest process for building a river of news:

1. Take a bunch of related feeds that you want to monitor, then mash them up. (I like to use Yahoo Pipes for feed mashups because of the relative ease and the great functionality.)
2. Sort the mashed up item stream. You’ll very likely want them presented reverse chronologically (most recent first).
3. Truncate your list to X items – say 25, 50, or whatever.
4. Publish the list to your blog – either in your navigation column, or on a page of its own, or a subdomain. (You can use the new Yahoo Pipes badging or custom code.)

Instead of writing a lengthy explanation of the coding process, I’ll refer you to Splashpress’ own Thord Hendgren and his recent article, Mashing Up Feeds Using Yahoo Pipes. I’ve written similar posts (linked above), but Thord has done a nice job of showing lots of screen snaps. What’s more, he’s provided and explained HTML/ PHP code that you can use in WordPress to parse your mashed feed stream and badge it on your blog.

How Can I Use a River of News For Niche X?

Assuming you apply the instructions that Thord gives, here’s what you might do:

1. Pick out the RSS feeds you want to monitor, including building custom feeds using Google News, Yahoo News, etc.
2. Apply the process I’ve given.
3. Use Thord’s badging process and code.
4. Tweak your WP theme’s CSS stylesheet to present your river of news text in whatever way you like.

The result will look something like this snapshot, below, from Wisdump’s right hand navigation column (depending on your stylesheet settings). You can also modify Thord’s code to add an excerpt, though I’ll cover that later.

Summary

Thord’s code is intended for use in a navigation bar on a WordPress blog. In the next installment of this series, I will discuss presenting a river of news on a separate blog page or on the home page. In a subsequent installment, I might get into a more customized presentation.

[Advanced users] To review, a river of news is a mashup of RSS feeds, arranged in (reverse) chronological order and presented on a web page. Normally, an RSS reader might suffice to monitor a blog niche, but my intent is to produce a Techmeme clone. A step in that direction is a Techmeme River clone, which is what this post is for. Either tool can be immensely useful if you want to keep on top of

Please review Part 1 of this mini-series, which goes over the basics of building a clone of Techmeme River. In that article, we produced an HTML badge that shows a block of headlines collated from multiple source feeds. The intent in this article is to present the headlines block in the content area of a blog instead of in the navigation column.

As with the previous article, I am not supplying 100% of the code, just the basics. This article, unlike the last, is intended for advanced WP users as a stepping stone for producing a Techmeme River clone that lives on its home page. If you’re serious about building your own version, I’m assuming you will likely pursue your own development, based on what I discuss here. (If you simply need such a tool, I’m available for consulting.)

I’ve built a tool, RideSpottr, for monitoring automotive niche blogs, and I’ll use it as an example below.

What You’ll Need

Here’s what you’ll need for this WordPress hack:

1. Theme: You can use any WordPress theme you like, but I chose the Popurls clone theme package from Ericulous. It includes a modified version of the Simplr WP theme, as well as instructions for specific WP Plugins.
2. Plugins: I only used the Exec-PHP plugin, which the Popurls clone theme also uses. The other plugins are not necessary. This plugin, when activated, allows your blog to execute WP/PHP code that is contained in a blog post.
3. Feeds: Mashup your selection of feeds to create a superfeed. As previously mentioned, I prefer using Yahoo Pipes because of the ease with which I can manipulate RSS feeds. You can use whatever web service you prefer. Notes:
   • Be sure that the superfeed you use for monitoring a blog niche is
     actually in the RSS format and not the Atom or RDF feed formats.
   • Make sure that you sort the superfeed’s items reverse chronologically.
4. Code block: The engine for your river of news is a block of PHP code that will only execute properly on a WordPress blog. The code block starts off identical to the code show in Thord Hendgren’s article Mashing Up Feeds Using Yahoo Pipes, which I referred to in the previous article. After that, I apply a serious of tweaks, which are only partially discussed below.
5. WordPress: Of course, you’ll need an installation of WordPress to test this. You might be eager to use the brand spanking new WP 2.5, but I highly recommend that you DO NOT use anything in the WP 2.3.x or higher series, else you might run into technical difficulties. WP 2.3.x (or even slightly earlier) have significant database changes that normally wouldn’t introduced into an intermediate version. (That is, such changes should have been reserved for, say, 3.0.) So you could run into problems like I did.
6. Blueprint CSS Grid Framework code: This is only necessary if you want to pretty up the river of news with some structured layout framework. It is not a Google product but can be downloaded from the Blueprint CSS pages at Google Code. Follow the install instructions discussed there. Do not use the “compressed” version, which typically gets placed in a subdirectory of the WP theme you’re using. I had trouble getting this to work. The default approach allows you to change themes if you like. (The default of Blueprint is 950 px wide pages. So your theme should support this, unless you feel like doing a lot of tweaking. That’s why I used Ericulous’ modified Simplr theme, as mentioned above.)

A Few Cautions

There are a couple of factors that you should be aware of before starting.

1. The WP/PHP code block uses a WP function, fetch_rss(). This function is very sensitive, and if there are any problems with the input superfeed, nothing will show up. I was constantly in a hair-tearing frame of mind because some of the source feeds had a different format for the “pubDate” field (publishing date/ time stamp). Yahoo Pipes would sometimes work and then immediately after would not. There’s absolutely no way a production web service should rely on Yahoo Pipes. Use it as a prototyper only. If you use Pipes in this hack, like I have, expect that your test site’s home page will occasionally show no headline items.
2. More Pipes issues: use only RSS formats, not RDF or Atom. Also make sure that if you plan to display the date/ time stamp in your river of news, that the source feeds use the same format. Else Pipes may not sort properly.
3. The WP/PHP code block I use (presented in full somewhere below) is not robust. It does not have full error handling and is simply meant as a starting point for you to work with.
4. I did manage to get my test sites working on WP 2.3.3, but not without problems. If you apply this approach, you’d better have patience and enjoy a challenge. I have a long way to go before I have robust web service, despite the hours I’ve already poured in.

Just don’t give up on this hack – it’s very useful as a niche monitor. If you have a more reliable way than Yahoo Pipes to “normalize” all the input feeds for the superfeed, then try that. If you have any questions about this WordPress hack, drop a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.

Example: Automotive Blog Niche

I’ve built two test sites in a slightly different manner, to test different theories. The one mentioned below is RideSpottr, which depending on what I’m trying in the code, may show headline items or might not (because of the problems in Yahoo Pipes). RideSpottr’s layout, at the time of this writing, is no work of beauty and is by no means robust. Though I intend to apply the principle of kaizen and improve it by slow degrees over time – in hopes that it might actually be something other people will use.

Stage 1: Raw List

The instructions below assume that you have already installed WordPress, Ericulous’ modified Simplr theme (for his Popurls clone), and the Exec-PHP plugin. (See above for links.)

1. In your WP admin panel, change your “Reading” options to allow only one blog post to display on the home page.
2. Follow Thord’s instructions (linked above) for building a “network feed”. He offers the necessary HTML/ WP/ PHP code necessary to produce an HTML badge.
3. Take the exact code in Thord’s article and paste it into a new blog post in WP. Make sure you have turned off “WYSIWYG” mode in the WP editor.
4. “Publish” the blog post, then view your home page.
5. If you can see headline items, then you can now use your own feed.

Suggestions: Don’t monkey around with Yahoo Pipes to start with. I suggest that you use a single source feed (not a superfeed) while you’re testing, and when you have headline items displaying the way you want, you can use a superfeed.

The result of using Thord’s code will look something like the snapshot below.

Stage 2: Prettying Things Up

From here, you can apply a series of improvements using WP/PHP code tweaks. (My experience over two years is that most performancing members don’t care to see the code step by step. What I’ll do here instead is, as with the last article, describe the steps. There’s also a section somewhere below where you can obtain the final code block and use it for your river of news.)

1. Add a timestamp.
2. Change Feedburner URLs to native URLs. Many sites use Feedburner to “burn” their news feeds. But Feedburner feeds retain the original source URLs, so you can publish these in your river, if you prefer. I did this in Yahoo Pipes.
3. Add floating item excerpt. In an earlier version of my river tool, I did not display item excerpts. Instead, I set up the river so that if a visitor moused over a headline, an item excerpt would appear in a floating box. In later versions, I dropped this. If you want to do this, it is already set up in Ericulous’ modified Simplr theme. You’ll need to study his sample code to understand how this works, as I’m not discussing it here.
4. Insert author name of news item. Some RSS feeds publish this as an “author” field, others as “dc:creator”. Since I’ve used Yahoo Pipes for building the superfeed, I’ve converted all dc:creator values to “author”. But some feeds do not contain any author info, so be warned of this. This does not cause an error in the river of news, though. The author will just show blank.
5. Apply a grid layout. After I got the headlines and related info displaying in my river of news, I applied the Blueprint CSS grid framework to control overall presentation.
6. Add feed sources column. To spiffy things up, an earlier version of my river had a column showing the URLs of blogs/sites used in the superfeed. I later changed the text links to 240×90 banners, though I could also have used screen snapshots of home pages. (If you build a serious, robust tool, you might be able to sell that banner space as advertising.)

Additional Improvements to Consider

Before I get into the actual code used, here are some additional improvements that you might consider trying.

1. Normalize all the date formats. I found that many of the feeds that I wanted to include in the superfeed had different pubDate formats. Some didn’t even use “pubDate”. Without having to do a great deal of hacking in Yahoo Pipes, I simply could not include many feeds. It would be nice to add date format handling to “normalize” item publishing date for any RSS feed.
2. Format the date. The current date/time stamp format isn’t pretty. A nicer format might be “Sun Mar 30, 2008; 10:05:00 am,” or some such.
3. Limit the number of items per source feed. Currently, if one blog has lots of recent items and others have few, the former will dominate in the river of news. Limiting the number of headline items per source feed is one way to resolve this. If you use 50 display slots like I have, thenyou’ll want to trim each input feed to a maximum of X items each. X will decrease as the number of input feeds, N, increases (Xv,N^).
4. Filter for authority sites. Don’t randomly add blogs from a given niche. Pick those that are authority sites.

Just the Code, Please

Okay, if you just want the short summary and code, here it is:

1. Pick an unused domain or subdomain.
2. Install WP. I recommend something before 2.3.
3. Install and activate Ericulous’ modified Simplr theme.
4. Install and activate the Exec-PHP plugin.
5. Install the Blueprint grid framework code. Follow their installation instructions, as there are a couple of lines to add to your header.php file.
6. Set WP to only display one post maximum on the home page.
7. Take the code shown below and paste into a new blog post. Publish the post and refresh your home page.

The HTML/ WP/ PHP Code Block

The code shown below gets pasted into a blog post. You could try pasting it into your index.php file, but I haven’t gone there yet. You’re on your own.

    
RideSpottr - automotive news
    

    items) && 0 != count($rss->items) ) {
          ?>

  

              items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 50);
              foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
                  $pubdate = wp_specialchars($item['pubdate']);
                  $desc = wp_specialchars(substr(strip_tags($item['description']), 0,200) );
                  $auth = wp_specialchars($item['author']);
              ?>

    

      

      

        
by 
      
      

        
        
      
    


              

  


           no rss items to display
\n";
          } ?>


  


    

    

      
RideSpottr Sources











    

    


  

Now you’ll need to change the code as follows:

1. Replace the heading text in a way relevant to the niche you want to monitor.
2. Replace the feed URL used in fetch_rss();
3. Change the HTML code where the site banners are displayed.
4. Spiffy up the CSS to make the river of news more attractive than I’ve got it.

Summary

To keep this article relatively readable, I’ve not gone into great detail about the coding. Experiment on your own, and ask questions in the comments, if you like. Good luck.

WordPress 2.5 was just released, and if you read Matt Mullenweg’s post, you’ll see that it has lots of great new features. I’m simply summarizing here.

User Features

Here are features that a user with access to the admin panel will see:

1. Cleaner dashboard.
2. Dashboard widgets, including statistics.
3. Multiple simultaneous file uploading, with progress bars.
4. EXIF extraction for camera metadata.
5. Search that includes both posts and pages. (Previously, search was post-only.)
6. Tag management without plugins.
7. Password strength meter.
8. Edit protection, so that two or more authors cannot simultaneously edit a post or page.
9. Minimized plugin upgrading. This is host-dependent, but WP 2.5 can download and install plugin upgrades for you.
10. Non-desctructive WYSIWYG (visual) editor. The old visual editor mangles your HTML code after saving. The new one uses TinyMCE v3.0 to avoid this issue.
11. Built-in photo galleries.

Developer Features

Developers of WordPress plugins and themes, or those who customize WP installations have these new features to look forwards to:

1. Salted passwords. (If you don’t know, don’t worry.)
2. Secure cookies.
3. Easier URL creation from page taxonomies.
4. Inline documentation.
5. Database optimization. (Matt’s post says they haven’t changed the database table structure with this release, but I’m not clear on this. My experience shows they changed the database schema back around 2.2x. (I don’t remember what X was.). I feel this was a big mistake for a non-major release version. However, it’s possible they changed back in a subsequent release.)
6. Optimized database queries.
7. Media buttons.
8. Shortcode API, for applying custom short notations in posts that expand into content during page render. This is accomplished through custom WP PHP functions you can develop for each shortcode. So you might have a “gallery” shortcode with parameters, “, and then write a PHP function called “gallery_func” to define the shortcode behavior during page render. [Note: this alone will make WP an even more powerful all-purpose CMS for both blogs and websites.]

As you can see, there are a great deal of new features for everyone. I’m going to be working with a WP 2.5 installation, and I’ll blog about positive and negative aspects on an ongoing basis.

Should You Upgrade to WP 2.5?

No one can argue that there are not lots of incredible new features in WP 2.5. Just watch the 4-minute video screencast of the new interface for starters. Just be sure that you’re prepared to upgrade. Here’s a very generic upgrade process:

1. Backup themes, plugins, and uploaded files (e.g., images), in the same directory structure. Use your favorite FTP software.
2. Depending on the version of WP you currently have, backup the blog content or export it. If your WP is very old, you may have some hair-pulling time ahead of you, thanks to database changes since around version 2.2x.
3. Remove your current WP installation and reinstall a new version. Depending on how long you think it’ll take you to re-install, you might publish a temporary index.html that says “Back shortly” or some such message.
4. Reactivate your theme and plugins, and make sure you’re using the same Permalinks options. (There’s a community-built list of plugins that work and don’t work with WP 2.5.)
5. Test everything.
6. Rejoice.

I also wrote a quick and safe WP upgrade approach earlier. I recommend this for those of you that are concerned with messing with your live blog. I’ve been reading since before WP 2.3 of how annoyed some WordPress bloggers have been that older themes and plugins no longer work properly. I’ve experienced this as well and for that reason, I’ve only installed WP 2.3x and up on brand new blogs. (I.e., no time to monkey with upgrading.)