BKaF – Brad Kovach and Friends

WordPress has been a primary source of income for me. It has been the driving force behind my success in my local communities. A major WordPress upgrade is coming: WordPress 2.5. Because of it’s impending release, I will be postponing the completion of several projects in order to be able to support the newer, better WP 2.5. Please enjoy looking at some screenshots of 2.5! Click any shot to make it bigger.

New Administration Interface

A total revamp has taken place. A light-blue and orange color scheme looks progressive, some say it’s too artsy. As you can see, the new color scheme is fresh, and definitely unique. Use of the color orange shows important HUD-style information. You can see it used in the comments menu, where a count of unapproved comments is shown.

The administration panels have been “divided” into the left tabs and the right tabs. The left tabs reflect pages that will effect your site’s content. The right tabs reflect settings for the site, such as plugins.

From the Dashboard, you can see several tasks, including links to write posts (blog entries) and pages. The shortcut to the page writing screen is a welcome addition.

New Post Writing Features

Developers have also revamped the post writing experience, including MUCH better media management, and plugin-free media embedding capabilities. You can easily embed images, audio, and video with WordPress 2.5. Also, rather than uploading, you can hotlink media from another website with ease. When you upload media, you can upload MULTIPLE files at the same time.

When adding photos, you have a new size available: medium. It’s an intermediate between thumbnails and full-sized. The photo add screen will let you apply css classes to images using a pleasant wizard-style GUI. Theme developers should note that adding css classes align-left, align-right, and align-center to your css will allow users to utilize these new layout features.

Uploaded media also appears in the Manage > Media Library tab, where you can easily flip through sort and filter uploads by file type and search by name. The media listing shows where certain assets have been used, and offers a permalink to the asset.

Improved search

WordPress search will examine posts and pages for content in WP 2.5 without additional plugins or hacks. The WordPress community’s cries have been answered. Previously, I preferred using the Search Everything plugin.

Better Security Practices

A new class has been in the WordPress codebase, called $wp->prepare. It basically takes user input and sanitizes it for safe database storage. WordPress 2.5 expects developers to begin using $wp-prepare to ramp up security.

Work on the XML-RPC interface has been completed as well. As for performance? I don’t know what the status is. I imagine that all fortifications will need to remain in place for high-traffic sites.

WordPress 2.5 is expected to be completed by March 10, 2008.

For more on WordPress 2.5

• See the codex article here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.5
• WordPress interface guidelines
• Download a nightly build.

I went on a Speech trip this weekend. And I got my trash kicked.

I wasn’t ranked at all, and not very many people laughed at the piece I did. I sat in the Jackson Hole High School cafeteria for 10+ hours, and ate more pizza than I remember eating in a long time.

But I was OK. I wasn’t mad.

Usually, when I compete and lose, I get irritated. Maybe it’s because I feel that people will evaluate me on whether or not I win or lose. Maybe I just don’t like losing.

But this time was different. I went, I performed, and I enjoyed doing it. Wanting to win was still there, but I just enjoyed myself.

Odds are, as high school students, we are involved in one sort of activity or another, whether it’s Football, Wrestling, Track, Science Club, Speech, etc.

Why do we do these things?

Do you know?

-Tom

It’s time for another calculus exam! So I’ve made another note card. Enjoy

Download the card!