All the staff blogs for Weber School District have been upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. We were using version 2.6, and are now at version 2.9. You shouldn’t notice any change to how your blog actually looks, but the administration panel will look quite different. Don’t be too confused by it, though. The only real major difference is that the menu bar is now vertical instead of horizontal. There are also a few very useful widgets on the dashboard such as a “Quick Post” box, and the ability to customize how the dashboard looks. Note that if you have multiple blogs, they are now accessible from “My Blogs” under the Dashboard menu item. This upgrade fixes some problems with the Flash uploader, allows many newer themes to be added, adds support for nested comments, and a lot of other features.
The following is a brief instructional video by Justin McFarland about the changes.

Some new plugins have been added as well:
Admin Management Xtended
Enabling this plugin will alter your Dashboard, and provide some extra features that you may enjoy. You can more easily change page orders, manage categories, toggle post and link visibilities, and a lot of other changes. Try it out, and if you don’t like it, you can always deactivate it.
Advanced Spoiler
This plugin allows you to hide parts of your posts and pages, by placing them inside spoiler tags. The reader can click a “Show” link to display the hidden text. This is great if you want to save space on your blog, by providing a brief summary of your post at the beginning, then the full content in a hidden spoiler.
Google AJAX Translation
This plugin replaces the old Translate plugin, and provides a lot more languages a reader can translate your posts to. This plugin can translate on a post-by-post basis or a sitewide basis (use the widget for sitewide functionality), and can even translate comments, whereas the old plugin was a sitewide-or-nothing deal.
Quick Search
If your blog theme has a search box, this provides very nice real-time search results that goes beyond what WordPress offers natively. Search results are broken out into Posts, Pages, and Comments.
WP-Archives
This plugin allows you to create a nice, cleanly-formatted archives page. Just add <!–wp_archives–> anywhere on a blog page or post, and it’ll make a list of all your posts, organized by date. Click the “Archives” tab at the top of my blog for an example.
Snazzy Archives
Try Snazzy Archives if WP-Archives isn’t flashy enough for you. It’s another way to create an archive, but with a graphical twist. It has different layout options to organize your posts. There’s quite a few options available for it. Snazzy Archives seems to work better on blogs with wide pagespace.
Tweet Blender
This is a plugin that lets you enter specific users, hashtags, and more from Twitter, and display them as a real-time feed in a sidebar widget. You can see I’m currently using this under “Tweeting Educators” with the “#edchat” hashtag, which many educators on Twitter use to discuss educational topics.
WP-PageNavi
If you don’t like the “Newer Posts” and “Older Posts” link that appear at the bottom of the page, try activating this plugin. It provides numbered pagination boxes for easier navigation.
WordPress Hashcash
This is a good spam prevention plugin. In the near future, I’ll probably force it to be turned on for everyone’s blog. It basically requires that a commenter have Javascript capability in their browser. The vast majority of human web surfers in 2010 have Javascript-enabled browsers. However, spambots usually ignore Javascript, which means that spambot comments will be automatically flagged and pushed to the spam folder. This is quite different from normal spam prevention techniques, which typically read the message itself, look at IP addresses, user-agents, or other things to determine if a comment was written by a human or not.
Firestats
This plugin was actually added awhile ago, but I should note that this is now automatically turned on for everyone. It is available under the “Dashboard” menu item. You can turn it off, but I highly recommend you leave it on, because it is now used to calculate the “Visitors per Day” ranking on the WSD Blog Statistics page. This plugin helps you see who visits your blog, how many hits you get each day, the search terms people use to find it, other sites that are linking to your blog, and a lot of other helpful information. You may have been using the Slimstat plugin before. That has been removed and replaced by Firestats.
If you notice any problems with the new blogs or the plugins, please let me know. Also remember, if you find a theme you like and would like to see added, let me know about it as well. Make sure it is “widget-enabled” first, because we won’t add any that aren’t.