The Problem

Everything went well with YAPB until I decided to upload my first photo to my blog. I created a new post, added a title, image, and description, and pressed submit. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. After quite a while, the web page decided to load for me and it spewed a rather cryptic error that went along the lines of “Warning: unlink() [function.unlink]: No such file or directory”. Below that it simply said “Error: file does not exist!” My super-geeky brain didn’t seem to be working well that day, so I couldn’t seem to decipher the error until I turned to my extra-super-geeky friend Google and asked him what I should do.

A quick search showed that many other people seemed to be having the same problem, and when I searched a bit deeper, I managed to trace the solution.

The Solution

It’s quite simple, really:

1. Login to your WordPress admin area.
2. Navigate to Settings > Miscellaneous.
3. In the Store uploads in this folder text box, enter “wp-content/uploads”.
4. Click the Save Changes button.

That’s it! For some reason, when WordPress says that the default upload folder is wp-content/uploads, it’s really lying. Either that, or YAPB is holding a knife to its back and making it lie. Either way, the above steps should solve your problem once and for all. You can now upload photos to your photoblog happily ever after.

Let me know in the comments if this solution works for you!

It just did.

Say hello to WordPress 2.8, or version “Baker” as they call it, named after noted trumpet player and vocalist Chet Baker.  Living up to WordPress standards, there are many new features in this version, as well as over 790 bug fixes from the previous version.

Inline Theme Installation

In WordPress 2.7, a great new feature was released called “One-Click Plugin Installation”.  Now this same idea has come to the themes section!  No more do you need to download a theme, unzip it, upload it to your site, and activate it.  Now you simply browse the theme gallery right from the dashboard, pick the theme you want, and press the “install” button.  Bam – it’s up and running on your server!  No hassle with zip files or uploading.

Syntax Highlighting

Editing template files (via the file editor in the dashboard) used to be dull black and white.  Now, with the new CodePress editor, it comes to life with colorful syntax highlighting.

Widgets Improvement

Previously, editing widgets was a pretty big hassle.  If you had multiple sidebars, there was no easy way to get one widget from one sidebar to the other, and if you deleted a widget, you’d love all of its settings.  If you wanted to use that same widget again, you’d have to reenter all of the settings that you had before.

WordPress 2.8 fixes both of these issues.  Now you can see all of your sidebars on the same page (no need to edit, save, switch sidebars, edit, save) and drag and drop widgets between them.  Also, if you set up a widget just the way you like it, and want to save it for later use, you can drag it to the “Inactive Widgets” area.  If you need it again in the future, just drag it out from that area and into one of your sidebars.

Screen Options

The great new interface that was added in WordPress 2.7 gave you the option to drag and drop sections in the dashboard to suit your needs.  Now, WordPress 2.8 gives you many more options for customization.  Here are a few of them:

• You can specify if you want 1, 2, 3, or 4 columns on the dashboard.
• In the Posts and Pages sections, you can specify what info you want to be displayed, such as Author, Categories, Tags, etc.
• Also in the Posts and Pages sections, you can specify how many items you want to display per page.

Speed Optimization

According to the WordPress.org blog, WordPress 2.8 is even faster than 2.7 due to optimized javascript and behind-the-scenes tweaks.  This means that the everyday actions such as approving comments, switching pages, and editing posts are even faster than before.

Conclusion

Taking into account the new features in WordPress 2.8 Baker, I would strongly encourage you to download it and give it a spin yourself.  If you already have 2.7, it’s as easy as pressing “Automatic Upgrade” in the admin.

As always, if you’re looking for information on the next version of WordPress (version 2.9), you can simply change the URL of the documentation from http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8 to http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.9.  There’s not much there yet, but there will be pretty soon!

And be good, find the best hosting for your needs. I love 1&1 but there’s something for everyone.

What are inline comment replies?

Inline comment replies is a feature that lets you reply to comments on a blog, and have your reply show up directly below the comment you are replying to.

Imagine this scenario: you’re reading an interesting article on one of your favorite topics, and after you finish reading, you decide to read through the comments and see what other people are saying about it.  You start going through the comments, and see one towards the top that’s from a guy who has a question about the article.  Since you have a lot of experience on the article’s topic, you immediately know the answer to his question and decide to answer it.  There’s only one problem – after that guy posted his question, 50 other people posted comments below his.  Now, if you were to post a comment in reply to his question, it would be so far away that he probably wouldn’t ever see it.  This is a pretty big problem, right?

Enter inline comment replies.  Now, if the blog you’re reading has this feature installed, you can simply click “reply” on the guy’s question, type your answer, and your comment will show up right below his (indented a bit so it stands out from all the other comments).  Pretty nice, right?  Or is it?

The problem

Though this may sound like a great feature, and in fact it is useful most of the time, there is one problem with it.  If you have an extremely popular blog that gets tons of comments within seconds of a new article being posted, then everyone is going to want to be one of the first to comment so that their website link is clicked most.  Normally, you could only do this if you literally sat on the site and clicked refresh every couple of seconds until a new article showed up, and then typed a comment as fast as you could.  However, with inline replies, you can just reply to the first comment on a post, and your reply is displayed right below the first comment.

If the first comment is an actual question, and the reply is an answer to that question, then this is fine.  But if the reply is nothing more than a way to get a link to the top of the comment list, then this can become a problem.

The solution?

The obvious solution for this is to simply not use inline comment replies on your blog.  However, sometimes it is a nice feature to have on your blog, and you don’t want to give it up.  So what do you do?

One thing you can do is manually delete comments that are obviously from people trying to just get to the top of the comment list.  The problem with this is the 1) the commenter might wonder where his comment went and get angry at you for deleting it or 2) the comment could actually have some good content in it, but doesn’t have anything to do with the comment it’s in reply to.  Deleting it would be removing legitimate content.

Another thing you could do is just move the reply comment to the bottom of the list.  The commenter might get annoyed that his comment was moved, but at least he didn’t get away with his scheme.

So now I ask you – do you worry about this on your blog, and if so, how do you prevent it from happening?

While we were all just getting used to 2.6 (and getting frustrated at some of its problems), the WordPress team was working hard at improving their product even more.  The result?  WordPress 2.7.  I have to admit that of all of their releases, the WordPress team has really outdone themselves with this one.  Not only do I love the new sleek interface, but the usability has been improved so much from the previous version that everything just seems to “work” how it should.

Below I have listed and described some of this great release’s best features, in the hopes that all of you WordPress users out there will see the light and upgrade their installations.

1. Sleek New Interface

As I said before, this version has a sleek new interface that makes it extremely easy to use for the average Joe.  Not only does it look really awesome, but it gives users the ability to customize almost all of its elements.  For example, on the new dashboard, if you don’t like having the “Recent Drafts” box on the top of the page, you can just click and drag it around to a different place.  Or, if you want to get rid of it completely, you can click on the “Screen Options” tab and unselect the “Recent Drafts” check box to delete it.

That’s just a small taste of the new interface, and there’s a host of other features that I haven’t talked about, but if you want to see them all then you’ll have to install it and check it out yourself.

2. One-click Plugin Installation

Before this version, whenever you wanted to install a new plugin on your blog, you would have to go to the WordPress plugin database, download the plugin, unzip it to your computer, upload it to the server, and finally activate it on your site’s admin.  Now that has all changed.  To install a new plugin in the new version, just go to the “Add Plugin” page in your WordPress admin, find the plugin that you want to install, and press the “Install” button.  That’s it!  No more hassle with downloading/unzipping/uploading to the server.

3. Quickpress

Quickpress makes it easy for you to write a basic post right from your dashboard.  You can still have all of the necessities in the post – title, text, tags, and media – but it’s a lost easier to post a short article in a few minutes instead of writing a full-fledged article with all of the other things on the “Add New Post” page to distract you.

4. Keyboard Shortcuts

Moderating comments has never been easier.  Now, on the new comments page, you can edit your blog’s comments with just the press of a key – literally!  Press J and K to select the next/previous comment, press A to approve, S to spam, and D to delete the selected comment, and finally press U to unapprove, Q to “Quick Edit” a comment, and R to reply to a comment all from the same page.  You can also bulk edit comments by using the checkboxes next to each of them and pressing Shift+A to approve, Shift+S to spam, Shift+D to delete, and Shift+U to unapprove the checked comments.

5. Comment Threading

Comment threading is a more advanced way of keeping track of replies to other comments.  For example, say you went to your website and saw that someone had posted a question at comment #7, and that there were 60 other comments after it.  If you wanted to answer the question in that comment, normally you would have to just post a new comment after all of those other comments, and hope that the person who wrote the question would sort through all of the comments and find your answer.  That’s a pain, isn’t it?  Enter comment threading.  Now, instead of having your comment come after all of those 60 other comments, you can simply press the “reply to this comment” button on comment #7, and type in your answer.  Your comment will be posted right after the question, and the asker can just find his own comment again and see the answer right after it.

6. Automatic Upgrader

Another big hassle with previous versions of WordPress was upgrading to a new release of the platform.  You would have to go to http://www.wordpress.org/download/, download the new release, unzip it, and then follow the instructions at the Upgrading WordPress.  If everything went right (which, often, it doesn’t), then you would have the new version installed on your site.  Again, that is a big hassle, and the WordPress team knows that.  So they decided to make everything easier for everyone, and add an “Automatic Upgrader” feature to version 2.7.  So now, when future releases come out, all you need to do is click the “stay updated” link at the bottom of your admin page, and WordPress will do all the dirty work of unzipping/uploading the new release for you.  Pretty nice!

7. Lots of more new and cool features…

Here are some of the smaller features that I didn’t get to mention in more detail above:

• Sticky Posts lets you make a post “stick” to the front page in front of all the other posts for a while (until you tell it to stop).
• Theme Update API tells you when there is a new version of one of your themes, just like the Plugin API does.
• Comment Paging so that you don’t have to have a super-long list of comments on a post.
• Batch and Inline Editing is a feature that got left out of the previous version, but got put into 2.7.  It lets you edit posts/pages right from the edit page, without having to actually enter the “edit page/post” page.
• Post Box Hiding for when you’re editing a post/page.

There are a few more features, but these are the best ones from my perspective.

I hope that after reading this article, you will strongly consider upgrading your WordPress installation to the new, sleek, cool, functional version 2.7.  And if you upgrade before January 4th of 2009, you will even have the option of getting in the Winter mood and having snow fall over all of your pages for a few weeks!  Now you have to upgrade.

1. Post Revisions

One of the best new features (in my opinion) is Post Revisions.  Let’s say that you made a big mistake when you were writing a post (like deleting all of the content or something else big), and then you ally saved it without fixing the problem.  In earlier versions of WordPress, you would just have to go and fix the problem manually, which could take you forever.  But in version 2.6, when you scroll down to the bottom of a page when editing a post, you will see a new section named Post Revisions.  In this section, you can view, compare, and restore previous revisions.  Never worry about losing your work again!

2. Theme Previewer

Another good new feature is the Theme Previewer.  As you can guess from the title, this feature lets you preview your themes without having to apply them to your site first.  Not only that, but it even puts your own content into the preview so that it looks exactly like what your users would see.

3. Press This!

The new “Press This!” feature lets you post about articles that you find on the internet.  In the post editing page, on the right-hand sidebar, there is a section labeled Shortcuts.  Under this, you will see some text and then a link named “Press This”.  Save this link to your bookmarks by clicking and dragging it to your bookmarks folder, or by right-clicking on it and selecting “Bookmark this link”.  Now whenever you’re surfing the web and you find a blog post you like, all you have to do is press the “Press This” link in your bookmarks, and it will take you to a new blog post where you can write about the post you found, and add text, photos, and videos that are on the original post page.

4. Image Captions

When you’re writing a post to your blog and you want to insert a picture into it, but you want to be able to tell the user what the picture is representing, then the new Image Captions feature is just the right thing for you.  All you have to do is click the “Add an Image” button above your post, select the picture you want to insert, add a title, and then type your description into the box labeled “Caption”.  When you view your new blog post, you will see your picture along with its description below it.

5. Activate/Deactivate Multiple Plugins

In previous versions of WordPress, when you wanted to activate or deactivate multiple plugins, you had to do each of them separately, which, combined with page reloads, took quite a long time.  But now, in version 2.6, you can activate/deactivate multiple plugins all at the same time.  Just check the plugins that you want to modify, hit the “Activate” or “Deactivate” buttons, and voila!  They are all modified!

6. Many more smaller features

Above, I have mentioned some of the major features that come with this new version of WordPress.  But that’s not all!  There are many more smaller features, some of which are as follows.

• Word Count is displayed alongside the post editor.
• Gallery Sorting allows you to sort your pictures in stead of having them be in the same order that you uploaded them in.
• Avatar Display gives you more options for displaying avatars in discussions, such as using gravatars, identicons, and more.
• Shift + Click Selection lets you Shift + Click to select a line of posts/pages for editing.
• TinyMCE 3.1 Support
• Newest Jquery Support
  
• Google Gears for offline support.

And more!  I hope that this post has helped you to decide to upgrade to WordPress 2.6, and has shown you some of the benefits of doing so.

Until next time, keep designing!

Update: There is a new version of WordPress out!  You can read my review of it at the WordPress 2.7 article.