WordPress 2.5 was finally released today, after much anticipation. Matt Mullenweg did a comprehensive post on the WordPress Blog about this new update and the changes to 2.5. I won’t go through all the major changes - - just read Matt’s post.. he’s done a nice job of explaining a few things and includes a video on some the enhancements. The WordPress.Org website has undergone a brand new re-design that coordinates with the new design of the WordPress Dashboard, as well. Some very nice improvements in the design you’ll notice when you upgrade to WordPress 2.4 - - it’s a little difficult to get used to, at first, but it’s a lighter interface with, overall, some very nice improvements. I think once users get over the initial shock of everything looking different and being moved around and renamed… the old design will be a distant memory as we all move forward. My only sticky point on the new interface design is that it is all left aligned. On my 1280 monitor - - it’s a little hard to take. But if that’s the worst of it - I’m good.

Matt Mullenweg announced on his blog this week that all free WordPress.Com accounts now come with 3 Gigabytes of disk space available. This is HUGE - considering that space generally costs money on the web and 3GB is rather generous. The space increase for WordPress.Com users is not only useful, but greatly appreciated!

The space is increased from the original 50MB - that’s quite a leap!

More details can be found at the WordPress.Com News Blog:

Much of the work we do at Automattic is behind the scenes, infrastructure you’ll (hopefully) never notice or see, but we’re always thinking about how the improvements we make to the foundation of the site will allow us to build more interesting things on top of it.

…..

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

This question came in via my email today, from a reader of my WordPress For Dummies book, regarding adding themes to a WordPress.Com blog ¹ :

How do I set up my wordpress.com blog to use your xMark theme? The setup instructions on the website say to send the xMark folder to the server, but that sounds like a wordpress.org setup. …. Recently I’ve tried again using the wordpress.com setup, and found that was more my speed. Now that my blog is up, http://dominickrusso.wordpress.com/ I’m trying to find a fluid theme, and that’s why I wanted to try xMark.

1. Management of themes on your WordPress.Com account is covered in WordPress For Dummies in Chapter 5. [↩]

It can never be said often enough: Backup your blog!

There are two things to keep in mind here:

1. Your posts, comments, trackbacks, link lists, categories and WordPress option settings are all stored in the MYSQL database on your web server account
2. The images you’ve uploaded, the plugins you’ve installed and the theme templates you’ve uploaded are not stored in your MYSQL database

Why is this important? Because when you back up your blog, you essentially need to do two things:

1. Back up the MYSQL database to ensure you’ve backed up all your blog data and option settings
2. Backup any images, plugins and themes so you have backups of those, as well

These two things require two different methods. Let’s do the easy one first:

WordPress.Com offers a VIP Hosting service if your blog is getting more traffic than you can handle. What kind of traffic are we talking… well, WordPress.Com gives an example of a blog that gets more than 500,000 pageviews a month. VIP Hosting isn’t cheap, and it is not offered to everyone. Have a look at the services you get:

• You create WordPress.com accounts, import your content, and point your DNS at us.
• WordPress.com will load balance your site across our hundreds of servers. (**This alone, for a high traffic blog, is worth the price of admission)
• You can have your own domain name.
• People logged in to WordPress.com will also be logged in on your domain, which makes it easier for them to comment and link you. (Also gives you free integration with our My Comments, Tag Surfer, and avatar features.)
• Included enterprise-level Akismet spam protection.

As anyone who as tried to run WordPress MU on a web server knows, you need to have a hosting partner who has the capability of handling the server requirements to run WordPress MU. I’m referring not only to the Apache, MYSQL and PHP requirements:

* PHP 4.2 or greater
* MySQL 4.0 or greater
* The mod_rewrite Apache module

I’m also referring to the VHost and DNS configurations that need to be made in the httpd.conf file at the server level. You will need this configuration if you intend to use the subdomain feature with WordPress MU. You can use either the subdomain or subdirectory feature in WordPress MU. This refers to the URL of each of the user blogs within your WordPress MU network:

• Subdirectory Method: http://yourdomain.com/user
• Subdomain Method: http://user.yourdomain.com

The Subdomain Method is the most popular, and most recommended (most MU plugins are created for use with the subdomain method).