Over night WordPress 3.1.4 was released.

WordPress 3.1.4 is a maintenance and security update, which fixes an issue that could allow a malicious Editor-level user to gain further access to the website.

It also incorporates several other security fixes and hardening measures.

OM4 clients will be happy to know that as part of their hosting, administration and support service all of their websites have already been updated to WordPress 3.1.4. See the OM4 Change History page for more details.

WordPress 3.1.4 Security Release

We have recently updated the OM4 platform to include the latest WordPress (3.1) features, bug fixes and improvements.

There are quite a few improvements, including:

• Internal Linking, which makes it much easier to create a link to your existing posts and pages. See screenshot below.
• Admin Bar, which means you’re only ever one click away from the most common Dashboard features.
• Simplified Writing Interface, with the post and page editor now display fewer options (metaboxes) by default. Visit Screen Options in the top right to get old panels back.
• Sortable Dashboard List Screens, making it easier to find information in your Dashboard.
• Improved Importer/Exporter, which allows you to export just post or pages (instead of everything), as well as only exporting certain date ranges, categories, authors, statuses, and more.
• Internet Explorer 9 Compatibility – the Visual Editor should now work as expected with IE9.
• and many more

The full list of over 800 new features, bug fixes and improvements can be found here.

We hope these improvements make administering and using your OM4 website a much more enjoyable task.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or post your question on our support desk.

WordPress 3.1: Internal Linking, Admin Bar, IE9 and More

WordPress Powers almost 13% of the Alexa 1M in 2010

We launched our first WordPress website in 2006, and since then I’ve been involved in developing hundreds of business websites. I’ve helped many people start to use WordPress to manage their own website, and also responded to questions that come up about day to day usage.

From my perspective, the single biggest factor driving WordPress adoption is ease of use. Even though there are books and other documentation available, most people learn to use WordPress by logging in and using the Dashboard to edit their own content.

Because of ease of use, end users have been adopting WordPress in droves. A few figures from recent surveys on market share make this clear:

• WordPress is used by over 13% of the Alexa 1M, the largest 1 million websites in the world as tracked by Alexa (2)
• WordPress is used by over 14% of all websites (1)
• WordPress is the dominant Content Management System (CMS), used more than 54% of the time where a CMS is used in a website (1)
• WordPress was reported as averaging almost 1M downloads a week in 2010, more than 8 times the downloads of its nearest rival (2)

The growth has not been driven by website developers. For a while there was some talk (touted by non-WordPress people) that WordPress might be ‘just a blogging platform’. Drupal and Joomla developers seem convinced they have the better development tool for websites. It isn’t true and isn’t the point. Even if WordPress WAS harder for developers to use the Drupal/Joomla, developers couldn’t drive the kind of growth that is being seen with WordPress. When it comes to a CMS, the end user is pretty much the whole story.

Check out this view from Google Trends:

WordPress vs ASP in Google Trends

The trendline for ASP suggests the platform has imploded. The flatline trend shown for DotNetNuke (the open source CMS that uses Microsoft’s ASP.NET) suggests that it isn’t just about open source vs proprietary systems.

Ease of use is one of those things that is easy to say and hard to do. WordPress has done it, and is reaping the benefits.

WordPress Downloads nearly 1M per week in 2010

WordPress Has 14 Percent Website Market Share in 2011

Sources:
W3Techs Web Technology Surveys (1)
2010 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, water&stone (2010). (2)

WordPress is Growing and Ease of Use is the Key

Our open source WordPress plugins have been updated to ensure they work with WordPress 3.1. The plugins are:

• AWeber Integration version 2.1
• Typekit Fonts for WordPress version 1.1
• WeatherZone Embed version 1.1

If you’re already using these plugins, be sure to update to the latest versions.

These plugins have had over 32,000 downloads (combined), and we’re looking at releasing a few new plugins in the near future.

OM4 WordPress Plugins and WordPress 3.1

We have recently upgraded the OM4 platform to include the latest WordPress (2.9 and 2.9.1) features.

There are quite a few improvements, including:

• Undo/trash feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash).
• Built-in image editor, which allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images.
• Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv.
• Improved visual editor
• Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
• and many more

The full list of over 500 new features, changes upgrades and improvements can be found here.

We hope these performance improvements make administering your website a much more enjoyable task.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or post your question on our forums.

WordPress 2.9 Upgrade: Image Editing, Undo/Trash, Improved Video Embeds

Recently Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post explaining why a strategy of keeping up to date with WordPress upgrades and patches is a good idea: How To Keep WordPress Secure

All our OM4 websites run on WordPress. Each time a WordPress upgrade or patch is released, we assess it and apply it.

When security patches are released, we apply them promptly.

With larger upgrades, it might take us a bit longer to make sure any required changes are integrated to enable new functionality. Some upgrades introduce a lot of new functionality that require changes to theme files. Sometimes plugins aren’t compatible with updates and we have to co-ordinate the update with plugin updates to keep everything working together.

We’ve been doing this ever since launching our first WordPress site, and plan to keep doing it. As Matt says, there are no guarantees, but it is a good strategy for keeping your WordPress website secure.

Keeping WordPress Secure

We have recently upgraded the OM4 platform to include the lastest WordPress (2.8 and 2.8.1) features.

There are quite a few improvements, including:

• A much faster dashboard interface
• A new drag-and-drop sidebar widgets interface
• New screen options on every dashboard page (the tab at the top right)
• Improved timezone support with automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support for more than one image gallery on a single page
• and many more

The full list of over 180 new features, changes upgrades and improvements can be found here.

Our Own Performance Benchmarks

Our own before and after testing has demonstrated an average of a 55% decrease in dashboard page load times:

• Main Dashboard
  • Before: 50 file requests,  366KB total file size
  • After: 13 file requests,  167KB total file size
• Write Post Screen (with visual editor and kitchen sink enabled)
  • Before: 108 file requests,  774KB total file size
  • After: 23 file requests,  340KB total file size
• Manage Pages Screen
  • Before: 16 file requests,  289KB total file size
  • After: 11 file requests,  173KB total file size

We hope these performance improvements make administering your website a much more enjoyable task.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or post your question on our forums.

WordPress 2.8 Upgrade: Improved Dashboard Performance and Widgets

There have been a few reports recently about the WordPress dashboard sometimes responding slowly. This was occurring for some of our OM4 WordPressMU client sites.

Occasionally a dashboard page load could take up to 15-30 seconds to complete. This is much longer than a typical page load, and could be quite frustrating.

The problem was caused by a bug in WordPress MU – we’ve applied a fix to our platform because it was so annoying but the problem is due to be fixed in the next version of WordPress MU (2.7.1) as well.

We’re always on the lookout for performance issues with our OM4 WordPress sites and fix them if they occur. So if you notice any problems, please let us know.

Intermittent WordPress dashboard performance problems resolved

As promised last week, we have upgraded the OM4 platform to include the lastest WordPress (2.7) features.

There are quite a few improvements, including:

• Completely new Dashboard design and navigation menu
• Threaded comments, paging and the ability to reply to comments directly from your dashboard
• Bulk post/page editing
• Quick editing of posts/pages
• Drag and drop rearranging of dashboard widgets/boxes
• Ability to upload files without having to create a post or page first
• Easy moderation of comments using keyboard shortcuts
• and many more

The video below also illustrates some of these changes. Alternatively a more detailed list of the changes is available here.

The new dashboard will take a little bit of getting used to, but once you’ve used it for a few days you should find that it’s a lot easier to use.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or post your question on our forums.

WordPress 2.7 Upgrade: New Dashboard Design and Features

WordPress 2.7 has now been released for WordPress MU.

WordPress 2.7 Dashboard

The 2.7 Dashboard is a great piece of work. The menus have changed a bit, but the new menus are very easy to understand so you shouldn’t have trouble using them.

There are many new features in the Dashboard that are intuitive to use.

If you would like to get a quick overview of the changes that are coming, you can play the video below. And you can read a more detailed list of the changes in text form as well.

If there is anything that doesn’t make sense to you, pop on to our forums and you can ask any questions there.

WordPress 2.7 for MU