In tonight’s WordPress Austin meetup, we’re opening up the floor to questions and comments.
Announcements:
Hands-On WordPress meetup will be next Monday, July 11th. Focus of this meetup will be Image Handling with WordPress. Sign up on Meetup.com.
Hands-On WordPress will also be offering three classes: one on managing content and users; one on WordPress plugins; and one on Backing up/Google apps/additional functionality. For information on these classes, and how to sign up, go to handsonwordpress.com.
Discussion:
We then launched into a demonstration and discussion about WordPress 3.2, released yesterday.
How many people have downloaded WordPress 3.2? (Live counter; as of this post there had been 376,721 downloads since yesterday.)
Have you downloaded and installed it on your site? Did it go smoothly or did you have issues? Check your plugins, make sure your server/host has the most recent updates to PHP and mysql. Run the Health Check plugin to see if your site can run 3.2.
Beware: some (popular) plugins will run an older version of jquery, and if it loads jquery separate from WordPress, the plugin may no longer work. Apparently a NexGen Gallery slider isn’t working with 3.2,
Nick and Pat recommend backing up your site and your database before upgrading to 3.2. If you don’t have a backup and something goes wrong, you may not be able to downgrade to 3.1.
From there we started discussing the differences between WordPress multiuser and installing WordPress into subdirectories on a single domain.
Pat showed off Twenty Eleven, the new default theme for WordPress 3.2, with audible gasps of approval from the crowd. A beautiful redesign of an already very nice theme. He showed how the new theme handles header images (and showed it rotating images randomly) what is now being called “zen mode” which gets rid of all of the admin boxes so you can focus just on your writing.
Discussion drifted into conversation about site backups and SEO plugins, with a lot of recommendations. We also talked about our shared frustrations with the WordPress plugin directory.
One of our attendees had an excellent and easy tip for YouTube videos: if you grab the actual URL for the video and place it directly into your post (in HTML view only) on its own line, without the link code, WordPress will do the embed for you. (If you do it in the visual editor it will wrap it with the link code).
If you have problems with your upgrade to 3.2, are looking for a good plugin recommendation, or have other questions about WordPress, be sure to join the Austin WordPress Google Group and post your question to the collective.