I had a play with wordpress 2.6 today and have to say its pretty good, it feels a lot faster for some reason and the new features are top notch.

If your wondering what plugins i’m currently using, i’ll make a new post during the week so make sure you check back!

I think this would work well on talk playstation. I will need to take a step back and look at the design because it will be pretty hard to implement in. At the moment i’m think it will go under underneath the top bar with the ‘popular posts’ etc.

This gives talk playstation a chance to highlight some of it’s best topics as well as displaying the top news for that moment.

Take a look at the plugin here.

I’m not using NextGEN Gallery on this blog i’m using it for talk playstation because a lot of screenshots get posted and needed a more organised way of displaying images/galleries. If you take a look at talk playstation you will noticed that i’ve added a new slideshow in the sidebar. This is another neat feature of this plugin because it will randomly choose an image from the image folder and display it.

This adds more interactivity into the blog and in my opinions looks a lot better now. Also, i can now attach galleries to post so if we mention a game we can simply attach a gallery and say “check out some screenshots for this game”.

If you post a lot of images on your blog i’d highly recommend this plugin.

Over the weekend i started to look for an alternative, i found 2 decent ones, A modified version of ShareThis and Sociable. You can’t see them on this blog but i’ve implemented both of them on my Playstation blog. I’m using the ShareThis plugin on the main pages as i don’t want to clutter the look of the design etc, i’m using Sociable on the actual post. Hopefully visitors will start using these new features = more exposure.

This is one of the updates for talkplaystation that wasn’t on the list.

So if your looking for some social bookmarking plugins i really recommend the above i mentioned.

There is one thing i noticed is the fact that the backend is a little quicker and more responsive and they have fixed the uploader problem that i posted a week or two ago. The best thing about the new WordPress version is that new automatic plugin upgrade, it works like a treat if you run multiple blogs.

I was terrified, but glad its back to normal now.

All you need to do is add the following code to your wp_config.php file:

define(‘FTP_HOST’, ‘ftp://example.com/’);
define(‘FTP_USER’, ‘example_user’);
define(‘FTP_PASS’, ‘example_pass’);
//Set to true if your host uses SSL connections
define(‘FTP_SSL’, false);

I got the above code from this site, but there is a mistake in the code the author put…

define(‘FTP_HOST’, ‘ftp://example.com/’)
define(‘FTP_USER’, ‘example_user’);
define(‘FTP_PASS’, ‘example_pass’);
//Set to true if your host uses SSL connections
define(‘FTP_SSL’, false);

Spot the difference? There is a missing colon at the end of line 1. I hope this helps some of you that are having trouble with having to enter your ftp details everytime you go to automatically upgrade your plugins.

• Gregarious
• Advanced Tag Entry (works but not recommended for WordPress 2.5)
• Tag Suggest Thing

Over the weekend i’m going to look for some alternatives to the above plugins that don’t work. I’m sure there are plenty out there.

WordPress 2.5 works a lot quicker in the admin panel, whereas it was a bit sluggish pre 2.5. I like the new design and layout, it’s a lot easier to navigate around. Some people reported problems with ‘Popular contest’ plugin, getting a fatal error when enabling the plugin in WordPress 2.5. There is a fix for this, all you have to do is:

Open popularity-contest.php and scroll down to line 59. Replace require(’../../wp-blog-header.php’); with require(’../wp-blog-header.php’);

Click here for more information.

The current plugins i have installed as of now are:

• Advanced Tag Entry
• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack
• cforms II
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Gregarious
• Lightbox 2 Plugin
• MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
• Popularity Contest
• Robots Meta
• Similar Posts
• Tag Suggest Thing
• WordPress Video Plugin

The following are not compatible with WordPress 2.5:

• Gregarious
• Advanced Tag Entry
• Tag Suggest Thing

I’m sure either the plugin authors will update or there are replacements.

There are some new plugins added to the list such as Robots Meta, Similar Posts and Popularity Contest. Robots Meta is a decent plugin that adds meta tags to admin pages etc. Pages you don’t want indexing by search engines. Similar Posts and Popularity Contest plugins are used for the top bar i made.

Take a look at my previous plugin updates here and here.

If Akismet didn’t exist then i would have a horde of spam comments on my blog. Some people don’t activate Akismet because they prefer spam comments to make the blog look ‘busier’. I don’t agree with this, if i go to a blog and i see spam comments all over it, it would immediately put me off and i would probably never return.

The current list stands like this:-

• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack (i’ve had to update this a number of times in the past two weeks)
• cforms II
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Gregarious
• Lightbox 2 Plugin
• MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
• Tag Suggest Thing
• WordPress Video Plugin

Plugins i’ve got rid of:-

• SH-Autolink
• Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger
• WPvideo
• Enhanced WP-ContactForm

Why did i get rid of the above plugins?

Quite simply because they either broke or i found a better plugin.

SH-Autolink – I thought this plugin was a great idea, but to be honest, i never used so i had no reason to have it installed because i choose and link my own words to the specific sites.

Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger - I changed this for the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer because it broke. I think it broke when i installed Google XML Sitemaps. Unless the author updates, i won’t be using this plugin.

WPvideo – I embed Gametrailers.com videos to some of my gaming post and this plugin couldn’t do this for me. WordPress Video Plugin does this for me and can also embed videos from alot of other sources too.

Enhanced WP-ContactForm – I liked this plugin, it did exactly what i wanted, but when i discovered cform II i couldn’t resist not to use it. It’s the best contact form plugin you could wish for, you can customize it in everyway.

So there you go, my plugins update.

• SH-Autolink
• Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger
• Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress
• Tag Suggest Thing

They are very good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and would reccommend them along with the previous plugins i suggested. I will keep a look out for more plugins worth using and installing to your blog.

If you think there are any plugins worth installing, please let me know and i will check them out.

Below are my current list of plugins i’ve got enabled at the moment:-

• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack
• Enhanced WP-ContactForm
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• WPvideo

If you haven’t got any of the above plugins for your WordPress blog, i would highly recommend them.

I will be adding some more plugins when i’ve got round to it. I’ve been tampering with the design and sorting the pages etc. I’m gonna go to bed now because it’s about 3:30 am!