WordPress 2.7 is an awesome release. The revision of the admin backend, despite being so soon after the changes in 2.5, is fantastic… particularly for “real users”. I enjoyed putting forward my blunt perspective on the issue while Matt and Jane were in the crowd at WordCamp Australia. Developers and contributors don’t hear “you’re doing the right thing” and “thank you” often enough.

So, thank you WordPress hackers for another great release! (And thanks to Donncha for already working on the big merge for WordPress MU 2.7… I’m really looking forward to deploying it on GNOME Blogs.)

Plus, make sure you check out the in-yo-face download counter.

"Wordpress 2.7 is shit-hot" by Halans

• WordPress and WordPress MU (multi-user)

  It’s hard to make recommendations related to WordPress without mentioning the project itself, and its twisted sister, WordPress MU. Both are improving in leaps and bounds, and it’s a pleasure finding all the cool new things as I track their development trunks. WordPress 2.6 is the latest major release, with lots of cool new goodies… Donncha is rapidly catching up to those changes with WordPress MU. I wrote nice things about them on my Projects that make GNOME rock! post, too.

• Sandbox

  I am a minimalist at heart, but with a fondness for cleverly expressive minimalism, so the Sandbox theme blows my mind. If you just look at the theme on the surface, it seems like a very boring, no-frills blob of unstyled HTML. But the genius lays waiting beneath the surface, in the highly evolved markup. Cunningly generated classes deliver extraordinary flexibility to a designer working with CSS. Just look at the body and div.post tags to get a good idea of what you can do. Be the signal is 100% Sandbox + custom CSS, with no added ingredients… and it changes colour every hour!

• Akismet & Bad Behavior

  The one-two punch in my anti-blog-spam regime. Bad Behavior protects against abusive hosts and patterns of use, while Akismet does content filtering. As such, with an MTA analogy, they’re like a great combo of solid Postfix policy as front-line defense, plus DSPAM content filtering. Like my mailservers, I might not run both in every situation, but it’s great that they’re both available to protect the innocent.

• Twitter Tools

  Keeps my tweeps up to date with my blog, and lets my blog readers (bleeps?) know that I use Twitter and what I’m up to. I don’t use the daily blog archive feature, but lots of people enjoy that… despite it being one of the latest controversial content issues on Planets. I really ought to add identi.ca (or most likely “generic Twitter-style API”) support and see if Alex accepts the patch…

• OpenID

  It’s great that companies and sites like Sun, AOL and MySpace are becoming OpenID providers, but the web really needs more consumers. So pretty much every WordPress blog I set up has Will Norris’ WP-OpenID plugin installed. A while back I hacked it up to work with WordPress MU (always on, in mu-plugins), which was great for GNOME Blogs. I need to update that to the latest versions and see if Will might accept a nicer patch than the last one.

• Typogrify

  As a card-carrying Font Fascist, it delights me that so many folks are working hard to improve typography on the web. I know that sounds a bit like “folks are working hard to improve oxygen on the moon”, but we’ll get there. Typogrify filters your posts to provide some cute ways of draining your own swamp, such as adding helpful markup to improve styleability of things like allcaps words, initial quotes, etc.

• My own cheesy plugins

  I’ve only managed to upload a few of my custom plugins to the WordPress Extend repository (which is a fantastic way to manage plugins for a widely-used platform, by the way), and thus far they’re kinda simple and cheesy.

  • @reply automagically adds Twitter-style replying to your comments.
  • Bug Links adds stylish links to common FOSS bug tracking systems — this was mainly written for GNOME Blogs, so I’m particularly happy that Thomas uses it regularly for his very cool metacity blog.
  • OpenSearch* adds OpenSearch discovery to your WordPress site, so users can add your site to their search dropdown (in, say, Firefox). I need to improve it further to support the whole OpenSearch specification.
  • Tango Smilies makes your emoticons not look like arse!

Thanks, of course, to all of the developers and contributors to these projects.

After quite a bit of work, WP-OpenID is now ready for WPMU! Always wanted your WPMU install to consume OpenID for logins and comments? Now it can!

I am already running this modified version on blogs.gnome.org and perkypants.org (WPMU and WPSO respectively), in order to test the changes in both environments.

To try it out, download the WP-OpenID plugin, and follow the directions in the bug^Wpatch report. It’s a work-in-progress, but definitely ready to test.