On March 18, I read and wrote about the new features of Wordpress 2.5. When Automattic released 2.5 days later, I upgraded right away. But to my disappointment, there were some bugs when using the open source blogging tool on Windows Vista: on both IE7 (Internet Explorer 7.0) and Firefox 2.0. These errors were directly associated with the image upload and media library tools. I’ve managed to resolve the issue by reading Wordpress forums.

Here is how you fix these errors.

Firefox
Go into the root folder where you copy the wp-admin, wp-includes, wp-content folders. In that folder is a file called “.htaccess.” You need to edit this file so that the below code is inserted before # END WordPress.

The code that needs to be inserted before END WordPress is:
<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

After inserting that code, WordPress 2.5 should work in Firefox.

Internet Explorer 7.0
Make sure that you edit the same code above for Firefox. The .htaccess file needs to be edited along with the other following files.

In the file, ” root folder /wp-admin/includes/media.php “, there is a comma that throws off the photo upload tool. Here is the code that throws it off.

file_queue_error_handler : fileQueueError,
file_dialog_complete_handler : fileDialogComplete,

debug: false,
});

See that comma after debug: false? Delete it.

One more file has to be manipulated for Wordpress 2.5 to work in IE.

In the file, root folder /wp-includes/js/swfupload/handlers.js
There is a line of code that says:

.animate({minHeight:0,height:36,}, 400, null, function(){jQuery(this).children(’.describe’).remove()})

See that comma after height:36? Delete that comma! Make sure to save both files after deleting the commas and then Wordpress 2.5 should be fully functional in both IE and Firefox. I literally figured this out 5 minutes ago. Let me know if it works for you.

Information Source:
[1] WordPress ticket

I’ve been using WordPress for about 4 years now.  Every time WordPress releases an update, it’s exciting.  I feel this way because I have no problem saying that WordPress is the most influential and powerful open-source platform of our time.  I feel that it has a more profound affect on the open source world today than Wikipedia.  Wikipedia’s ‘open-sourceness’ is still controlled by a designated community of moderators whereas WordPress allows it’s users to express their individuality.

Other blogging platforms cannot be compared to WordPress.  I used Xanga for a while but it seems like that blog platform company has their own agenda.  After Google acquired, Blogger, it seems like not many additions were made.  Blogger is bland compared to WordPress.  You can modify the hell out of your WordPress look & feel to fit your personality.

There were a couple of limitations with previous versions of WordPress.  WordPress’ back-ends did not have an easy way to setup photo galleries.  And switching between the Wordpress Visual and Code editor forms were choppy too.  This becomes especially noticeable when embedding Java scripts.  Hopefully new versions of WordPress will address this issue.

On the WordPress blog, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress announced the new features of WordPress 2.5.  These features include:
“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.”

The most exciting part in the list above is the multi-file upload and galleries.  As an obsessive blogger, my hope is that WordPress will have the same abilities that Engadget’s content management system (CMS) has.  The rate that Engadget creates photo galleries makes it seem easy.  See what I’m referring to [here].

WordPress’ parent company is Automattic.  For previous Automattic coverage, refer to http://pulse2.com/category/automattic/.

Automattic, the company that created Wordpress and was recently funded, announced a new product yesterday called Prologue. The new product can be best described as Twitter for groups. The company said that messages can be sent internally or between groups.

Below is a screen shot from the demo I found on the Wordpress blog:

Some of the messages are from the developers of Automattic discussing what part of the project that they are working on. The whole prologue, the individual authors, all of the tags, combinations, or searches has their own RSS feeds.  Also messages can have their own Gravatar.

Prologues can be public or private and each message can have comments.  Comments also have built-in RSS feeds.  Since Automattic’s developers are so wide-spread, this tool is useful to their company internally.  They set up a password-protected Prologue, which is also available for all other users as well.

The code is open source and is available at: http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/prologue/.  The product is also available for Wordpress.com users under Presentation.

My guess is that if this product takes off, the company may enhance features for Prologue.  For example, creating a mobile version of the product may make sense.  For example, if I am a developer and want to announce to my team that I’ll be traveling so I cannot work on the site for a while, I can easily let them know without being near a computer.

[Information Source: Matt Mullenwag's blog]

Automattic is the parent company of Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com.  Wordpress.org is an open source blogging platform and Wordpress.com is the blogging community platform.  Automattic has officially received $29.5 million in funding from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Ventures, and the New York Times [source: NYT].

Some Wordpress.org competitors include Blogger and TypePad.  Wordpress.com competitors include Xanga and LiveJournal.   Automattic raised $1.1 million two years ago as well.  Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic stated that the funding would go towards building additional services.

The New York Times Company has been using the Wordpress platform for their subsidiaries for quite some time.  About.com, a New York Times Company subsidiary is based on the Wordpress platform.  And NYT has more than 50 blogs that are powered by Wordpress as well.

Wordpress also recently gave their users on Wordpress.com a major step-up in terms of storage capacity.  Wordpress users only had 50MB up until recently, but now they 3GB each.  Matt Mullenwag, founder of Wordpress hopes that this increase in capacity will encourage their users to prdouce richer media.  Users who have paid for 1GB in the past will get 5GB instead of the free 3GB.

The announcement is also confirmed on Matt Mullenwag’s blog.

Automattic is a startup company that is best known for creating WordPress.  WordPress is an open source blogging platform that many of the major technology blogs use, including Pulse 2.0.  Matt Mullenweg of Automattic stated that he saw Gravatar evolve over the years and saw that Gravatar had great potential, but might have a problem to scale its service.  And scaling is one of Automattic’s strengths, so they acquired Gravatar. 

Over the past few days, Automattic has taken the code for Gravatar and transferred the Rails application into Wordpress.com’s infrastructure.  Gravatar now works three times as fast.  Gravatar’s Premium features will become free and also combine the number of avatars that Wordpress.com has with the avatars available on Gravatar.  Wordpress.com has about a million avatars and Gravatar has about 115,000.  Wordpress.com also made Gravatar avatars available at bigger sizes: from 80×80 to 128×128. 

Tom Werner is the creator of Gravatar.  Financial terms were undisclosed.