ericfaller.com Pithy Quote Goes Here

New WordPress

With all the hubbub this weekend about a new WordPress worm going around the internet, I decided to update my installation to the latest version. I had been keeping it up to date with security patches, but the version I had was so old that it had to be done manually, which was a real pain. The latest version (2.8) supposedly supports automatic updates so it should be much easier to stay up-to-date now. We'll see how it goes.

There have been a lot of changes since the release of the old version I was using, so it's possible a few links or other things have broken on the site. But I think it'll be worth it because there are also a lot of new features, most of which are under the cover. Some of the reader-visible features are:

• Threaded comments!  Now in the comments it's actually possible to reply to other people's comments and have them show up in a group.
• Commenter pictures. WordPress uses Gravatar avatars based on your email address. If you sign up for a Gravatar account, then your picture will show up on this blog and many other WordPress-based blogs. Of course you don't have to sign up for anything, and in that case then you will get a little auto-generated "Identicon" like this:

• Better themes and widget support. I haven't decided whether to port over my old hand-made theme from the previous installation, since it would take considerable re-writing to support all the new features like threaded comments. I'll probably take an existing 2.8 theme and tweak it to my liking. In the meantime, I'm using one of the default themes. Everything's still under construction so it'll probably all change soon.
• HTTPS on the admin and comment screens. This is long overdue.

Here's a picture of how the new threaded comment system looks: