As announced on Weblog Tools Collection and on the WordPress Plugin Competition Blog itself I just thought I’d help spread the word about the upcoming WordPress 2.5 Plugin Competition. And besides the fame and glory there’s already some cash and goodies in the pot for the winner(s).

You can read all about what, where and how on the above mentioned pages. In short “all” you need to do is write a plugin that is:

1. Original (new) and useful
2. Well documented
3. Supported

I’d love to participate, but workload has been somewhat keeping me busy 9 days a week lately. If you’re joining please leave a comment so we can follow your work from here - and not to forget, Good Luck!!

Just finished updating again. Took me about 10 minutes, nothing to it really. All plugins seams to work and there really isn’t many surprises when you log back in to the admin.

However, one thing that annoys me a little is the empty space the blog title leaves in the admin header and also the font size of the “sub-menu”. Consequently I’ve made a few minor changes to the admin to address this “issue”.

In short I want to implement the following changes (click to enlarge):

WordPress 2.5 adds tons of new features, but some disappeared as well. One of them is gzip compression that you could enable/disable from the control panel. On the other hand 2.5 introduced “a few” new features, among them a secret key for “salting password” and the possibility to increase memory allocated to PHP.

I’ve just finished tweaking my new WordPress 2.5 installation and thought I’d share a few pointers with the rest of you.

The secret key

Released with Version 2.5, this new, optional entry, called SECRET_KEY, causes better encryption of user passwords in the database. The secret key is a unique phrase.

define('SECRET_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); // Change this to a unique phrase.

More allocated memory

Also released with Version 2.5, the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT option allows you to specify the maximum amount of memory that can be consumed by PHP. This setting may be necessary in the event you receive a message such as “Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted”.

By default WP is allocating (trying to - depends on host) 32MB, you can increase this amount by adding e.g.

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64MB');

in the wp-settings.php file in your WP root directory.

Activate Cache

Similar to above you can activate page caching;

define('WP_CACHE', true);

If the WP_CACHE setting is set to true, the WP developers states that it will include the wp-content/advanced-cache.php script, when executing wp-settings.php. I for one does not see how this is done as I’m missing the included file, so if you know how this works please let me know!

GZip Compression

I believe a bug/malfunction in respect to the visual editor caused the removal of the gzip feature from the latest version. However a plugin is available that will re-enable this feature and save precious bandwidth. It simply takes advantage of PHP’s ob_gzhandler function.

I’d love to hear about more tweaks and rabbits, please feel free to share!

In case you are using Mr. Coolmann’s WordPress statistics plugin, Wp-Slimstat, then you might enjoy this unofficial release. Besides making it WordPress 2.5 compatible it also blends nicely with the new colour theme.

Installation - current users

To install, download Wp-Slimstat v.1.0.1, deactivate plugin, overwrite old file in your plugins directory with the new one and activate.

Installation - new users

Grab the code (including instructions) from the author directly. Before activating follow the simple steps as outlined above. This ensures the plugin is 2.5 compatible before activation. However, new users need a few extra files which is not included with the update.

Install and use at your own risk. It worked for me and should for you as well (I hope).

This marks my first post here on Blogvaria using the new and possibly better admin panel and features in WordPress 2.5. I’m also happy to report that all my plugins seems to work and that my theme handled the upgrade painlessly.

I’ve been running this blog on WordPress 2.2.x for some time now, but after reading several warnings about Technorati (and possibly others) planned index exclusion of vulnerable blogs I’ve decided it’s time to upgrade. After a quick test on localhost I didn’t see any reason not to go ahead.

However, things might break and I would really appreciate feedback in case you discover something out of the ordinary.

More updates will follow I’m sure, and soon a new theme which I will share as always.