WordPress Publisher Blog

WordPress 2.6 is now available:

Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Here is a brief video showing the latest features:

Head over to the WordPress.org blog for more details.

The self installed version of WordPress 2.5 was released just a few days ago, and now the new dashboard and new features present in WordPress 2.5 are live on WordPress.com and WordPress.com VIP.

Head over to the announcement post by Matt to read all the details.

[ Visit WordPress.com ]

WordPress 2.5 was released this past weekend:

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

You can read the full details on the WordPress.org blog, and watch the screencast below highlighting the excellent new gallery feature:

For those of you on WordPress.com and WordPress.com VIP, the new code with the redesigned dashboard should be rolling out soon.

[Visit WordPress.org]

You may have heard the exciting news that earlier this week Release Candidate 1 of WordPress 2.5 was released. The final version will be out soon, and for Publishers and developers now is a good time to take a look and see what’s new, including:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times

One of the most dramatic improvements can be found in the dashboard:

… we’ve been working with our friends at Happy Cog — Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico — to redesign WordPress from the ground-up. The result is a new way of interacting with WordPress that will remain familiar to seasoned users while improving the experience for everyone. This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint — we’ve re-thought the look of WordPress, as well as how it’s organized so that you can forget about the software and focus on your own creative pursuits.

You can read Jeffrey Zeldman’s thoughts on WordPress 2.5 here, and you can be sure we’ll be posting more info on this blog as we get closer to the official release.

[Visit WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peak]

Raanan wrote an excellent article about podcasting with WordPress using PodPress. Here I’m going to flip it around and discuss podcasts about WordPress.

The first is The WordPress Podcast hosted by Charles Stricklin and a rotation of co-hosts. Started in July of 2006, this is the most popular and longest running podcast dedicated to WordPress news. Charles is also one of the organizers of WordCamp Dallas at the end of March. Recently the frequency of shows has greatly increased.

Maybe influencing the regularity of The WordPress Podcast is a little friendly competition from the new WordPress Weekly. Started the beginning of this year, it is hosted by regular Weblog Tools Collection blogger Jeff Chandler (Jeffro2pt0) and is a live weekly call in show on Talkshoe.com.

They compliment my other sources of WordPress news, and even when I don’t have time to listen to the podcast right away, each provide excellent show notes.

A great way to learn more about WordPress and meet people from the WordPress community is to attend WordCamp.

What is WordCamp ? It’s an “informal gathering of WordPress users where we teach, learn, eat, drink and generally have fun with one another.”

Dallas WordCamp will be held in the George A. Purefoy Municipal Center in Frisco, Texas on March 29th and 30th of this year.

At the last WordCamp in San Francisco this past summer, it was great to see the strong turnout and diverse set of attendees and presenters. Jeremy Zilar of the New York Times captured it well on this blog post:

Well, camp is over, and all the campers have returned back to their nests. For those of you that missed out on the event, I would highly consider attending WordCamp 2008.

For more information & registration options for this upcoming Dallas WordCamp, please visit dallas.wordcamp.org.

We launched a new theme today for WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress called Prologue.

Prologue is a way for “each of us to share short messages about what we’re doing or working on internally, or private messages between groups of folks.”

As you can see from the screenshot below and by clicking through to the Prologue demo it’s all about helping teams of people communicate and collaborate in an efficient manner — similar to Twitter but with a focus on groups.

For publishers looking to deploy this kind of tool, Prologue is very easy to use.  Like other themes for WordPress, you can install this on WordPress.com with a single click in your “Presentation” tab, or quickly add it to your themes directory for self-installed WordPress.

And since Prologue is a theme,  it leverage the power of WordPress to provide user management, privacy settings, RSS feeds, Gravatar, and more.

Hi everyone !

Welcome to our new Publisher blog - written by various team members here at Automattic.  Our goal is to help all publishers get the most out of WordPress.

We’ll cover features that are often overlooked, we’ll highlight plugins that extend WordPress functionality, and we’ll showcase interesting sites being built with WordPress.

If you are a publisher working on an innovative project using WordPress,  or just have a questions, please contact us and let us know how we can help.