I wanted to write up something about the latest WordPress release, version 2.5. I have updated all of the WordPress powered sites that I manage which is more than ten and the upgrade went flawlessly on all sites. Each upgrade was the same, no variances. Why do I mention this part of the process? Well, because I have seen many instances (*cough*Win*cough*dows*cough*) where the same upgrade went very differently (and sometimes even failed) on different computers, even though they had been built or imaged or the application installed off of the same baseline. So, when I can install all of the WordPress upgrades and every one of them not only works, but operates as expected, that’s a big deal to me. This has been the norm in the past as well, not just in this last upgrade. Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t ever used WordPress for your website or blog, you don’t know what you are missing. I have used almost every CMS out there, including PHP-Nuke, Post-Nuke, e107, PHPWebsite, CPG to just name a few of the more popular ones. However, once WordPress got past the 2.0 versions, it was all over. I love the WordPress platform and use it for many different websites that I manage. I do sometimes run something other than WordPress if I have some specific need that something else does better, but for a good, solid blog and/or website platform I find it hard to beat WordPress.

That being said, one thing I have seen people have trouble with is Permalinks. This is when you change the link structure from the default style like this:

http://example.com/?page_id=N

to something more visually appealing like this:

http://example.com/category/post-name/

or

http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name

The friendly Permalink option is not only easier on your visitors, but it’s easier for search engines as well to index your site. That means that setting Permalinks to something friendly is a good idea on many fronts. You can set the Permalink style in the WordPress admin panel under Options. However, when you do that you also have to update your .htaccess file (on Apache) in order to process the links properly. I have included below a nice .htaccess snippet that you can drop in to get your Permalinks working, check it out:

# BEGIN WordPress Permalink Rules
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress Permalink Rules

I hope that will help in your Permalink adventures!