WordPress » Improving your plugin – Changelogs announces that a new section will be added to the readme.txt files that plugin authors should use to track changes. As a heavy user of plugins across several different websites this is a very nice improvement. It will make the plugin update that much smoother, as admins will no longer have to go hunting for changes on another website, it will just show up on the plugin upgrade panel. It is things like this that make the WordPress UI so good and why WordPress is my favourite framework. Hopefully authors will start using it.
Jamas
Earth 2100 – ABC News
If you are feeling good about the state of the world at the present time then I suggest giving a look at Earth 2100 – ABC News. It paints a pretty troubling outlook of the future of our planet and societies, if governments around the world fail to change the direction we are heading in. Here is hoping that none of this comes to pass.
Run Firefox Run
Firefox Updated to Version 3.5 today. As always it takes a few weeks for add-ons to be updated to work with the new version. So if you are a heavy add-on or theme user then you might want to wait a week or two.
First impressions is that things seems snappier. I have nothing to back this up but my usual websites seem to load faster.
A new feature that will be interesting to watch is the support for HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags. This allows better embedding in sites. The question will be if they get adopted by the web community. The demo on the firefox site was pretty smooth.
Another feature that has been in Safaria and other browsers in a Private Browsing Mode (nicknamed “porn mode” by many). The idea is not record anything about the sites you are visiting (cookies, history, etc.).
MySQL management with Navicat 8
For a new web project I had a large amount of data (over 7000 entries) that I had to load into several tables in a MySQL database. I originally went down the path of attempting to do this via SQL commands, but realized this was going to take more database knowledge then I had. So I went looking for a tool that could help me do this.
After trying out a few free demos I found Navicat 8 for MySQL. They had a free 30 day demo that did everything I needed. The upload of the data was a big success (took me 5 times to get the data exactly how I wanted it) and with Navicat I was able to do the data upload directly from an Excel spreadsheet. I was so impressed with this tool that I ended up buying a licenses. I have now made it part of my normal web project work flow: database backups, database repairs and browsing database structures when working on new projects.
Jamas.net now running WordPress 2.8
Another great release of WordPress has been released. WordPress 2.8 provides the back end user with lots of ability to control the look of each section of the admin menu. Great for hiding features that get in the way of an efficient work flow.
I have been working on some new projects using a few other CMS systems. WordPress still continues to stand out as my favourite because the WordPress team has put an amazing amount of effort into making the admin interface easy and intuitive.
As a reader of this site it should seem a little snappier with 2.8.
A big thanks to the WordPress team for another great release.