A security laps in Facebook has allowed strangers to gain access to your personal and so called “private” photos. This is not the first and I doubt the last security issue with FaceBook.  It would seem more and more we are hearing about personal data that is supposed to be secured being compromised.

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The all new Yahoo site “Shine” was launched today with the purpose of giving the struggling company a chance to sell advertising targeted at the key decision makers of most households.

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Starting with WordPress 2.3 there was a new template tag added for tags. This has also carried on to WordPress 2.5 version as well. Now if I lost you with what I mean by tag for tags just look at the bottom of this post and you will see a list of tags that I have used and are displayed. Tags are used sort of like categories, the can help to organize content on your blog.

If you would like to display tags below your own posts you can do so by adding a line of code to your theme. Now there are two places you can add this code pending on your own preference of where you would like to display the tags.

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With WordPress 2.5 there were not many changes made that will effect your themes. However avatar functions are a new addition. Not to worry this new feature can be quickly added to your existing theme within a few seconds.

The default avatar service is provided by Gravatar, however if you have an avatar plugin it can override this.

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I hope everyone did their part last night and went lights out for Earth Hour. Even the big shots turned off their lights; Google turned its site black to show its support.

It was interesting to see Google trying to lend its support, however a person can’t help but laugh at the fact that Google itself did a study last year and said “displaying black may actually increase energy usage.” However its the point of it all I suppose.

I must say though Its nice to see some of the big players giving back a little and showing their support for genuine good causes like Earth Hour. more people should follow suit.

For those of you wanting to use the K2 theme for your WordPress 2.5 installation you may want to be advised of a few current issues with the theme.

Problem:  K2 (< 1.0-RC5) Enabling Sidebar Modules/K2 Sidebar Manager breaks Dashboard.

Fix: Either disable Sidebar Modules/K2 Sidebar Manager in K2 Options or upgrade to 1.0-RC5.

Well as always the rumors are floating around about good old Google. Seems this time the talk is all about Google wanting to buy out digg.com Word is that Google had made an offer of $200-$225 million

True or not this has made for some interesting reading. Jay Adelson Digg CEO tried to hush the subject, however I can’t say he was very successful in doing so.

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Ok so now you have WordPress version 2.5 at your fingertips, all you need to do now is upgrade your blogs. The following is the official 3 step upgrade guide provided by WordPress.

Step 0: Before You Get Started

• Just in case something goes wrong, make sure you have a backup. WordPress_Backups is a comprehensive guide.
• Deactivate your plugins. A plugin might not be compatible with the new version, so it’s nice to check for new versions of them and deactivate any that may cause problems. You can reactivate plugins one-by-one after the upgrade.

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Source: WikipediaWith the newly released version of WordPress there will be a few user who might need a bit of direction when it comes to installation. With that being said here is the famous 5 Minute Install guide for you to use and follow.

1. Download and unzip the WordPress package, if you haven’t already.
2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.
3. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
4. Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and fill in your database details.
5. Place the WordPress files in the desired location on your web server:
   • If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. http://example.com/), move or upload all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (but excluding the directory itself) into the root directory of your web server.
   • If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your web site (e.g. http://example.com/blog/), rename the directory wordpress to the name you’d like the subdirectory to have and move or upload it to your web server. For example if you want the WordPress installation in a subdirectory called “blog”, you should rename the directory called “wordpress” to “blog” and upload it to the root directory of your web server.

     Hint: If your FTP transfer is too slow read how to avoid FTPing at : Step 1: Download and Extract.

6. Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in your favorite web browser.
   • If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php
   • If you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit: http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php

That’s it! WordPress should now be installed :!:

Source: WikipediaThe big day is finally upon us, WordPress 2.5 has been officially released! It has been six months in process and is now available for download as a stable release.

The list of changes and additions is a tasty one for sure, I can hardly wait to complete this announcement and start upgrading my own blogs and check it out.

Hows this for upgrades: (Credit to Matt for posting this list @ the WordPress Blog)

User Features

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — we’ve worked hard to take your feedback about what’s most important in the dashboard and organize things to allow you to focus on what’s important — your blog — and get out of your way. In collaboration with Happy Cog and the community we’ve taken the first major step forward in the WordPress interface since version 1.5.

Dashboard Widgets — the dashboard home page is now a serious of widgets, including ones to show you fun stats about your posting, latest comments, people linking to you, new and popular plugins, and of course WordPress news. You can customize any of the dashboard widgets to show, for example, news from your local paper instead of WP news. Plugins can also hook in, for example the WordPress.com stats widget adds a handy double-wide stats box.

Multi-file upload with progress bar — before when you would upload a large file you’d wait forever, never knowing how far along it was. And uploading more than one photo was an exercise in patience, as you could only do one at a time. Now you can select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.

Bonus: EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template. If you use the EXIF title fields or similar those will be put into their equivalent fields in WP. Most modern digital cameras generate EXIF data.

Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too, a great boon for thoe using WordPress as a CMS. New themes can style or sort pages differently in results.

Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.

Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.

Concurrent editing protection — for those of you on multi-author blogs, have you ever opened a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other, irrecoverably losing hours of work? I bet that added a few words to your vocabulary. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done. You’ll see a message like below.

Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory since 2.3 we’ve told you when they have an update available. Now we take that to the next logical step — downloading and installing the upgrade for you. This is dependent a little bit on your host setup, and it may ask you for your FTP password much like OS X or Windows will ask you for a password, but it works well on majority of hosts we were able to test, your mileage may very, plugins in mirror may be larger than they appear.

Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.

Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, we have a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos. I’ve been using this feature on my blog and have already uploaded over 1,200 pictures into 23 galleries. The shortcode has some hidden options too, check out this documentation.

Developer Features

Now for the geeky stuff. While we’re excited about the above features, each one represents a new opportunity or API for other developers to take to another level. (The best of which we’ll someday integrate back into WP.)

Salted passwords — we now use the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, which makes brute-forcing them impractical. If you use something like mod_auth_mysql we’ve created a plugin that will allow you to use legacy MD5 hashing. (The hashing is completely pluggable.) Users will automatically switch to the more secure passwords next time they log in.

Secure cookies — cookies are now encrypted based on the protocol described in this PDF paper. which is something like user name|expiration time|HMAC( user name|expiration time, k) where k = HMAC(user name|expiration time, sk) and where sk is a secret key, which you can define in your config.

Easy taxonomy and URL creation — probably best illustrated with an example: I can call register_taxonomy() with a few arguments to register a “people” taxonomy and whenever I edit an image I’ll see a UI like tags has for identifying the people in a photo, and these will be URL addressable with /person/firstname-lastname/. All with a single function call.

Inline documentation — the vast majority of the new code going into WordPress include inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.

Database optimization — we haven’t changed the table layout in this release, which is one of the reasons so many plugins work fine with 2.5. We have added a few new indicies and made a few default fields more flexible based on some bottlenecks we found on WordPress.com, which now hosts 2.7 million WordPress blogs. It should be invisible to the application, just a bit faster on the database side.

$wpdb->prepare() — now almost all of the SQL in WordPress is prepared first, and the same functions are available to your plugins. This should prevent elementary SQL escaping issues.

Media buttons — the add media buttons above the post are both expandable, so you could have an “Add Google Map” button if you like, They can be overridden, so if you think you can do the video or audio tab better than we have you can replace the default.

Shortcode API — the new gallery functionality is powered by the new shortcode API. Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. They give users a short, easy to type and copy/paste string they can move around their post without worrying about messing up complex HTML or embed codes. The Shortcode API is fully documented.

Now you see why 2.5 took a little extra time.

Can you say WOW!!?