WordPress 2.5 Sneak Peak

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]

Podcasts About WordPress

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.

WordCamp Dallas 2008

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.

Prologue: Group Communication Using WordPress

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.

WordPress: Most Popular CMS in Technorati’s Top 100

The Technorati 100 is a list of the “biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by unique links in the last six months.”

John Conroy of CMSWire recently looked at that list and concluded that:

“Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second, and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust.”.

You can read Conrey’s full analysis here.

Welcome to the WordPress Publisher Blog

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.