Two things conspired together to great effect today – one, I have a spare domain name to mess around with and, two, Wordpress 3.0 is due for release within the next few weeks and I read it has multi site functionality. so, as Wordpress 3.0 RC 1 is already available to download ,I chose to install it, try it out and document my thoughts for all to read.
WordPress 3.0 – A First Look Review
Installing WordPress 3.0 is as easy as installing WordPress 2.x – just upload it, unpack it and browse it.
My first opinion of Wordpress 3.0 was Wow! The front end looks cleaner and crisper, it loads quicker, the admin panel’s sleeker, what’s it got under its bonnet?
After a few clicks in the admin panel I noticed it was little different to Wordpress 2.9. The options are roughly the same and are mostly in their old locations and the post creation page still uses the restricted version of the TinyMCE visual editor.
The main change I noticed in the admin panel is the configurable theme background and header image. After a little bit of research I learned that this is now a core part of Wordpress – theme designers can let the Wordpress API handle the integration of a blogger’s chosen images into his (or her) theme…
A lonely fact of a webmasters life is the time spent locked away in solitude as we notch up backlinks to our websites. Some come organically through people visiting our sites and bookmarking us on a do-follow social networking site or by placing a link to us on one of their own websites such as a free Wordpress or Tumblr blog. Other links we create artificially by connecting with other webmasters and asking them to link to us in return for a link back to them or we add our sites into the many directories that are available to us. It takes a lot of time to build backlinks even when auto submitters are used.
A couple of days ago I learned about a directory project that is changing all that. It is called BungeeBones and offers 10,000 backlinks for the price of 1. Intrigued, I took a look, thought this sounds good – too good to be true; so I looked more deeply into it and contacted the project’s leader to find out more details. After several email exchanges, which I might write about in a later article, and a bit of research I concluded the project is genuine and will do as it heralds, namely, give thousands of backlinks for the free price of one.
BungeeBones is a directory with a difference – it is a remotely hosted human edited directory hub that allows webmasters to plug-in to it and display it on their own websites. Any webmaster can submit URLs to the directory and can optionally place a version of the directory on a submitted site. Each version of the directory is a stand alone product. Thousands of webmasters are already plugged in and connected through it so a link submitted to a directory on one site will potentially display in every other directory that is connected to the hub. It is like using an automatic directory submitter: one click submits a link to thousands of directories.
We Wordpress bloggers are a funny lot. We style our sites with a theme, we edit it to get it how we want it, we think it’s perfect and then we see another theme that’s even more perfect so we start over again. Some of us even go so far as to learn to create our own “perfect” themes only to decide that the next pre-made one we see is even better. I suppose we just get bored very quickly. Well I know I do; and I get very annoyed with myself because each time I use a new theme I have to set it up to work with my plugins, ad server, widgets and content styling. So it was an absolute pleasure to find a very customizable theme that keeps my settings even after it’s been updated by the theme’s creator. It’s called Suffusion and has more options than a Jumbo Jet’s cockpit has buttons. Thankfully, its front cover comes with those immortal words from The Guide, “Don’t Panic”, written on it in big red letters.
