WordPress 2.0.5 RC1 (release candidate 1) is out. A number of changes have been made to 2.0.5 RC1 since we saw beta 1. There have been quite a few fixes and enhancements made in 2.0.5 so far, although most of them are pretty minor.
I upgraded this blog to 2.0.5 RC 1 a few hours ago. I haven’t noticed any problems or anything acting strangely, so 2.0.5 RC1 seems pretty stable. Not really a surprise, I was running betas and all sorts of weird releases a year ago or so, and all of them were stable as could be. I’ve come to expect near perfect beta and RC releases from the WordPress team. They do an excellent job.
If you’re interested in running this, you can download the nightly releases by joining the WP Testers mailing list. You can also download 2.0.5 RC 1 via subversion. To grab the latest release candidate with subversion, issue this command:
svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/branches/2.0
After issuing that subversion command you will have the latest copy of WordPress 2.0.5, weather it’s 2.0.5 RC1 or even a newer release.
Popularity: 4% [?]
I’ve released a new version of the Unwakeable WordPress theme. Unwakeable 1.091 takes some of the new CSS from Unsleepable 2.0.
There’s really very little Unsleepable 2.0 left in Unwakeable 1.091. I modified the CSS from Unsleepable so heavily it’s basically what it was at version 1.7 (the version Unwakeable was initially built off).
Unsleepable 2.0 included a taller header, which I removed and set back to the original height found in the initial release of Unwakeable. Ben was also using images in the background of the menu when hovering with your mouse, I removed those and switched back to simply using colors instead of colored images. I couldn’t really tell any difference between the two.
Ben also added drop shadows to the “page” section of Unsleepable 2.0. I did not carry these over to Unwakeable, simply because they wouldn’t fit this theme very well. It could have been done, I didn’t like how Unwakeable looked with the drop shadows though.
You can see the theme here on this site or you can see dev.longren.org for a preview of the newest development version. That site is using Unwakeable 1.091 and WordPress 2.0.5 beta 1. And, as you can probably tell, it’s just a default WP install, no additional plugins or anything.
Unwakeable 1.091 is 100% compatible with Internet Explorer 7. It looks beautiful in IE7, as well as Firefox and older releases of Internet Explorer. Head on over to the official Unwakeable page to download, or you can download from right here.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Ben Gray released Unsleepable 2.0 earlier today. Version 2.0 of Unsleepable is based on code from K2 0.9.1. From Openswitch:
I’ve just released version 2.0 of unsleepable. It is based on the K2 v.0.9.1 code and I have left all appropriate credits in the CSS. New to version 2.0 is shadows, a taller header, rolling archives, better live search, tweaked comments display and reply form, split footer, and more stuff that you’ll find out as you go.
Pretty sweet Ben, you shoulda done this about a week ago. :) It’s just my luck to see a new release of Unsleepable soon after I released a theme based off the old Unsleepable. Guess it’s time for me to update the Unwakeable code already. Look for a new version of Unwakeable by the end of the week.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Do you use Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress plugin to tag your posts? What about the Google Sitemaps plugin for sending google a copy of your sitemap?
If you use Ultimate Tag Warrior, as I do, you can get archive pages based off tags. For example, my wordpress tag page shows all posts tagged with “wordpress”. Simple enough.
Now, the Google Sitemaps plugin generates a sitemap of your site for submission to Google Sitemaps. The plugin will include categories, individual posts, static pages, and archives in the sitemap file it creates. However, it leaves out tag archives. This is simply due to the fact that the Google Sitemaps plugin author probably doesn’t use Ultimate Tag Warrior.
There’s some good information contained within tag archive pages, so we should probably be letting google know about them. We basically need to make the Google Sitemaps plugin recognize and make use of the tag archives. To do this, we need the Google Sitemaps - UltimateTagWarrior Tag Addon, a plugin for WordPress. Here’s the plugin description:
This plugin is a WordPress 2.0.4 plugin that automatically adds the UltimateTagWarrior tags onto the end of the google sitemap XML file as produced by the Google Sitemap plugin.
The plugin does exactly that, and nothing more. It simply generates a sitemap for your tag pages and appends that data to the end of the sitemap file created by the Google Sitemaps plugin. That’s all that’s required to include your tag pages in your sitemap file for sending to Google.
Please note that the Google Sitemaps - UltimateTagWarrior Tag Addon plugin requires version 2.0.4 of WordPress. Hopefully the author will update the plugin to support the upcoming WordPress 2.0.5.
Popularity: 5% [?]
You may have noticed the additional page up at the top. It’s home to my WordPress theme, Unwakeable. Unwakeable is basically K2 with the Unsleepable header.
It’s currently built off K2 0.9.1. I plan on keeping this theme in sync with all changes made to K2. So, when you see a new release of K2, expect a new release of this theme soon after.
This theme works with a wide range of plugins by default. The following plugins work by default with this theme, in addition to those already supported by K2:
- Digg Integrator
- WP-PostRatings
- WP-PostViews
- WordCount
- WP Admin Bar
This is NOT a style for K2. I’m releasing Unwakeable as a totally separate WordPress theme. One thing you should note is that this theme will inherit all the options you set for K2 in the K2 options page (assuming you were using K2 previously). Unwakeable make use of the same database options used by K2.
If you want a custom header graphic, check out Ben’s tutorial. Please let me know if you come across any problems with this theme, there are likely some things I missed.
In a related side note, WordPress.com added two new themes for users to choose from. They added Unsleepable and a stripped down K2. Coincidence? Definitely. Now would be the perfect time for WordPress.com to add Unwakeable, the combo Unsleepable/K2 theme. :)
You can download Unwakeable here or from the official Unwakeable page.
UPDATE: As the comment below says, Ben released Unsleepable 2.0. I’ll be updating Unwakeable within the week to include the new stuff from Unsleepable.
Popularity: 4% [?]
A week ago, Giganews increased their retention of binary usenet posts from 70 days to 90 days. Now, they’ve setup an official Giganews blog. Their first post says they’ll use the blog to keep “customers up to date on everything going on at Giganews”. If the site content were left simply at that, there wouldn’t be much content at all. I don’t think Giganews has many problems that they need to inform customers about. Their service has always worked 100% for me.
Luckily, they’ll also be posting on usenet related technologies, so I don’t think there’ll be any lack of content. There’s a lot of interesting things going on in the usenet world at the moment. But I won’t go into that here.
Hooray for you Giganews!
Popularity: 3% [?]
