WordPress is user friendly blog software and is widely used for blogging formats and website development. Basically, you have a choice whether to set up your blog through WordPress.com or WordPress.org. choosing between the two is important considering this will give you an idea on what WordPress is all about and how it can be of service to your business.

For aspiring web developers and bloggers, here’s a guide to choosing the right WordPress software for your business.

WordPress.com pros

-        Offers a fast and easy way in setting up your blog, its one way to make things easier and fast. It’s free multi user source sign up and publishes a blog immediately without delay. With it, you’re given a selected number of themes to choose from. Since the site is managed by WordPress, you don’t have to worry on things such as backing up your posts. Your blog is hosted on hundreds of servers, so don’t worry about it going down and all the other stuff to it. Don’t worry about spam, setup or security since it’s taken care of for you.

WordPress.com cons

-        One the bad side of it, you’re not able your own themes and plug-ins as well. In addition to that, WordPress won’t allow you to post Google AdSense ads or affiliate links. However, WordPress may on occasion show Google text ads on your site. They offer a VIP program that lets you run custom themes, and plug-ins to it. This is offered to blogs with high traffic. So basically you need to have good traffic to avail the benefits.

WordPress.org pros

-        Allows you to install any of the plug-ins and themes available. You have complete control over the way your site looks and will not be viewed as another run of the mill site. Also, WordPress plug-ins expands the functionality of your site. With those functionalities added, you blog basically become more versatile and you gain more benefits by using it.

WordPress.org cons

-        You need a hosting provider to allow you to use your MySQL databases and also your FTP access. Typically a host provider will cost you around less than $7 a month; services are found at GoDaddy.com. However they require a significant amount of technical knowledge to set up and run, so try to take some time on knowing such things. You’re also responsible for backing up content, handling spam and issues of traffic. Basically, it all places full responsibility on your as the blogger. This can help you in experimenting and trying some new things around.

Choosing between the two

-        Start at WordPress.com to learn how WordPress works and the whole flow of information is shared on their forums as well as understanding the functions plug-in and themes.  Basically, the start-up is free and you can decide if ever you want to blog or to host your very own site. After you get a good understanding on how WordPress works, you can export your content to your self-hosted WordPress site and if ever you want to the blog to appear more professional, WordPress.com offers you upgrades for that, thus making things easier for you. So, instead of your website appearing as abc.WordPress.com, it will appear as abc.com. Their forums also offer great support on information. You can also have options for plug-ins that allow emailing newsletters and other information to your client base. This way, you’ll always be informed of the news and the new features of WordPress.

Try to examine each and see what you feel about them, try them now and see how WordPress can aid you towards success.

Yet another unexpected release of WordPress has been out recently. WordPress 2.8.3 fixed a security bug that is related to the privilege escalation issues in version 2.8.1. Since this is a security release, upgrading is highly recommended.

You can download WordPress 2.8.3 or automatically upgrade from the Tools -> Upgrade page of your blog’s admin.

The release of WordPress 2.8.2 has been announced recently. It was an (unexpected) release with a fixed cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. Comment author URLs were not fully sanitized when displayed in the admin. This could be exploited to redirect you away from the admin to another site.

You can download WordPress 2.8.2 or automatically upgrade from the Tools -> Upgrade page of your blog’s admin.

WordPress 2.8.1 is now available for download. In this version, they fixed many bugs and tightened security for plugin administration pages.

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced.  Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.

You can automatically upgrade from 2.8 to 2.8.1 via the Tools -> Upgrade menu. Just one click on the notification menu “WordPress 2.8.1 is available! Please update now” and you are done.

bbPress is a plain and simple forum software integrated with WordPress. It’s easy to use, easy to administrate, fast and clean. Ater many months in alpha, beta and release candidate, bbPress 1.0 final (code name Bechet) is now available for download.

This release offers many usability improvements included:

• “Voices” count on topics reports the number of individuals participating in a conversation
• Native support for cookie integration (single sign-on) with WordPress 2.7 and 2.8
• Optional support for memcached object caching
• Time-zone and Daylight Savings time support
• A complete XML-RPC publishing API
• Pingback support – each topic can receive pingbacks, just like a blog post
• All javascript has been moved to jQuery
• Optionally allow login via email address as well as username
• New meta API allows arbitrary meta data to be stored for posts, topics, forums, options, tags or even meta (that’s right, meta-meta – first legitimate use wins a prize)!
• Display names used primarily for user identification display, which allows special characters to be used
• Themes can now have a “functions.php” file, which is automatically loaded
• Accessibility improvements on forms and in the default theme, including WAI-ARIA roles
• Major overhaul of the admin interface
• Optional Akismet statistics page
• Cute new icons
• Improved use of posts admin to manage spam
• Prettier Kakumei (default) theme
• Hello Louie! Plugin

If you are upgrading from any earlier release to 1.0 then you absolutely should backup all you files and database before doing so. You also may need to make minor adjustments to your templates. Before upgrading, disable all plugins.

Finally, WordPress 2.8 (code name “Baker”) is out! If you logged into your WordPress today you would notice a message saying “WordPress 2.8 is available! Please update now”. Just press one click and you are good to go

WordPress 2.8 represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. Some new features that make WordPress 2.8 more powerful are:

• Browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from your WordPress dashboard
• The new CodePress editor which syntax highlighting
• Edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars
• The new Screen Options on every page
• and More …

I’ve just updated ThemeLib and got no problem with installed themes and plugins. How about you?

The first public beta of WordPress 2.8 is available to download today. You are invited to install it, test it, and report bugs for the improvements.

There are lots of new features included in this release, some of them are:

• New Theme Installer routines
• Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
• Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
• Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
• Don’t notify post author of own comments
• Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
• Improved Widget user interface
• Improved Plugin search
• Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
• More …

Download wordpress 2.8 Beta 1

The first maintenance release of WordPress 2.7, WordPress 2.7.1, is available for download. Since it is just a maintenance release, upgrading is not a must.

In this version, they fixed 68 tickets including 6 tickets with a high rating and more than 50 rated as normal. Most of them are small bugs, not security problems.

You can automatically upgrade from 2.7 to 2.7.1 via the Tools -> Upgrade menu, or you can download the package and upgrade manually. I recommend you use Automatic upgrade, one of the highlighted features of WordPress 2.7. Just one click on the notification menu “WordPress 2.7.1 is available! Please update now” and you are done.

P/S: ThemeLib is now running on WordPress 2.7.1

Finally, WordPress 2.7 is out! If you log into your WordPress today you will notice a message saying “WordPress 2.7 is available! Please update now.” That is right, WordPress version 2.7 is available for download.

Some new features that make WordPress 2.7 more powerful are:

• The new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top
• One-click plugin installer that install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click
• Comment threading, paging
• The ability to reply to comments from your dashboard
• Sticky Posts

If you’re a WordPress junkie, download and install it now

Update: Now ThemeLib is running on WordPress 2.7

Another update of one of the famous blogging softwares, WordPress, has been released. WordPress 2.7 release candidate 1 included lots of bug fixed and brand-new menu icons taken from the winner of the Project icons.

If you don’t familiar with the term “Release candidate”, it refers to a version with potential to be a final product, ready to release with all features have been designed, coded and tested. So that means if you do want to use WordPress 2.7, it is almost safe to start using it now

I’ve just tested it on my local machine and it looks really good. The dashboard is pretty nice and the icon on the sidebar menu seems to be so cool and fantastic

Download WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1 now!