For those of you that love upgrading your WordPress install, you’ll be happy to know that WordPress 2.6 is now available for download!   Here is a quick video provided by the WordPress team (3.5 minutes):

New features include:

• Google Gears integration
• Press This! bookmarklet
• Wiki-like Edit Tracking
• Theme Previews
• Plugin Bulk Management
• Post Word Count
• Plugin Update Notification Bubble
• 194 Bug Fixes, Security Updates, and more!

If your concerned about upgrading to the newest branch of WordPress, don’t be:

2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

Now, I’m off to start upgrading my WordPress blogs!

Though WordPress has been around for quite awhile now, I would guess that a majority of WordPress users are fairly new to the platform (using it less than 2 years).   It wasn’t until about 2006 that WordPress really became widely recognized within the blogosphere.  If you are new to WordPress, have you ever found yourself wondering when or how WordPress got started? 

Yesterday our friend Keith, who is a writer for Weblog Tools Collection, recently wrote about the evolution of WordPress in his post B2/Cafelog to WordPress 1.0.   He chronicles the early years of WordPress (May 2003 through January 2004) and talks about the features that were introduced, many of which we now take for granted. 

I think posts like this are fun, but they also help us to appreciate things as they are now and to see how far both WordPress and blogging has come.   I switched my first blog to WordPress when WordPress 2.0 was originally released.  Within 2-3 days I was hooked and haven’t look back since!   Now I even use WordPress to develop most of my non-blogging websites as well. 

So, how about you?  What was the first version of WordPress you used?  

Just wanted to drop a quick post and let you know that I was recently interviewed by Jean of Cats Who Code and that it is now available online for anyone to read.  If you’d like to learn more about me professionally or personally, click here to read the interview.

I’m not really sure if this is a trend or just coincidence, but over the past week I’ve noticed quite a few of the blogs that I stumble upon require you to setup an account before you can leave a comment.  Anyone know what is up with that?

This is obviously a very useful WordPress feature for blogs that have a strong community built around their website, but I think most people should consider the consequences before they require you to register to comment.  A choice like this could keep truly hinder a new blogs growth or discourage a blogger who isn’t seeing the reader interaction they were hoping for.

As with pretty much everything, there are some positives and some negatives to doing this.  Off the top of my head, here are a few positives and negatives of requiring registration to leave a comment on a blog:

Positives of Registration

• Spam Prevention - Requiring registration should stop spam completely.
• More Options - Requiring registration opens up some interesting opportunities to customize comment appearance, allow you to create profiles, etc.   I’ve seen a few high profile websites do this, but the registration usually is optional instead of being required.

Negatives of Registration

• Less Comments - Some people value comments more than others, but I think most bloggers would find less comments to be a negative as the whole concept of blogging was formed around the concept of reader interaction with the writer.

I personally do not leave comments on blogs that require registration because it just isn’t worth it to me.  I have enough accounts to manage without trying to remember my account information.   I also think things like spam can easily be avoided for WordPress users using tools like Akismet and Bad Behavior, Spam Karma 2, or Math Comment Spam Protection (which we use here).

I’d like to hear what you think in the comments below.   How do you feel about blogs that require registration to comment?   Do you take the time to register or do you just decide not to comment at all?

If you follow the underground world of domain names, you’ve probably noticed that this past week, a lot of coverage has been focusing on hackers who managed to take over a few domains owned by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is the company who regulates the world’s domain names.     What you may not have heard about, however, is that in what appears to be an unrelated incident, ICANN also had their WordPress blog hacked about the same time.

In another unrelated incident, ICANN’s official blog was attacked using a recent exploit in the blogging software Wordpress. This attack is believed to have been automated and not done with any motivation regarding ICANN itself. The effects were limited to the blog being taken offline for a short while while updates and repairs took place.

ICANN getting their blog hacked was a direct result of failing to upgrade their WordPress installation.  Now obviously ICANN has a fairly high profile blog, but this appeared to be a random attack and can truly happen to anyone.

I’ve actually written in the past a few times about the importance of always upgrading your WordPress installation, but what most of you probably don’t know is that I preach this out of personal experience.  About a year and a half ago my original WordPress blog was hacked simply because I hadn’t upgraded my WordPress installation.  WordPress had released a fix and I didn’t upgrade right away.

I was actually very fortunate that the person who gained access to my site seemed to have good intentions, as he simply warned me to upgrade my WordPress installation.   Unfortunately, though, it is something I will never forget.  Not only do you feel personally violated when this happens, but I was dumb and used similar passwords for many of my other accounts.  Someone with bad intentions could have easily guessed my similar password I used for my email account, then had access to all my accounts and other personal information.

Since that time, I have always upgraded my websites/blogs that use WordPress the day the upgrade is available, and I have always been outspoken to others about upgrading their WordPress installations.  The WordPress team has really been doing a great job of lately of testing their software, so we aren’t usually seeing more than 3-4 upgrades within each WordPress branch (2.3.x, 2.5.x, etc.).   For those new to WordPress, I remember it often going up to 7 or sometimes more in the WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0 days.

In case you weren’t aware, you have a number of options when upgrading your WordPress installation.  Obviously there is the manual upgrade, which many people dread.  Other upgrade options include upgrading via Fantastico, or upgrading using a WordPress plugin such as WordPress Automatic Upgrade.

Would you say that you usually upgrade your WordPress installation right away?

Once again the fourth of July is upon us, and for those of us in the United States, this marks a paid vacation day the day we celebrate our independence and freedom!

Though I plan to take the day off, I did want to offer a quick note I ran across about WordPress.  I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention a post by Planet Ozh about what WordPress plugin authors need to know about WordPress 2.6.  The post covers changes to both the wp-content directory and the wp-config.php files and will likely force many plugin authors to update their plugins for WordPress 2.6. If you are the author of a WordPress plugin, you should probably check this out.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday!