If the developers of WordPress make only one change in the software for its new 2.4 release (which is due out at the end of January) I want it to be this:

Remove the "Howdy, so-and-so" message in the admin section.

Howdy? Come on. We're not juveniles (as much as Matt may think we are.) We're not a bunch of 5 year olds wearing faux cowboy boots and hats running around our yard playing cowboys and Indians. We're grown-ups. And "howdy" is just ridiculous.

Grow Up, Matt and the other developers. Lose the "Howdy."

According to Packt Publishing, WordPress wins best Social Networking CMS. And I think it's a complete sham.

From their site:

Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.

Just installed WordPress 2.3... begrudgingly. I really had no desire to, but since I was already a couple version behind, I thought, what the hell.

WordPress 2.3 really didn't have anything new for me. Sure, it has tagging, but I use (err, used) Ultimate Tag Warrior and loved it.

And WordPress 2.3 likes to break some installs on upgrades. I just edited my contact page and I got an error. The contact form itself works, but editing the page was a pain.

UPDATE: got it working using single_tag_title(); (which I didn't see listed in the WordPress Codex...)

I'm trying to get my LetoPrime theme ready for WordPress 2.3. The whole purpose of 2.3 (well, the main purpose) is to get tagging posts into the core of WordPress. Now this has been available for quite a while now; I've been using Ultimate Tag Warrior for a long time and I absolutely love it. But the developer of UTW, Christine, is stopping development of it since it's redundant to have two tagging functions. (I disagree with that, however.)

One of the things that really bothers me about WordPress is polls. Now there are a couple of really good poll plugins for WordPress, but if you want to make the poll as part of the blog hierarchy, as part of the normal chronology of the site, you have to create the poll in one screen then add the tags to your post. Not really a friendly way to go.

In Drupal, you create the poll, and if you have the polls content type set to appear on the front page, it'll be there after you submit it.

You may have heard about the goPHP5 website, which is an organization that wanted to get web hosts and open source projects to phase out PHP4 (what many hosts use by default now) and focus on PHP5. (Since the project started, PHP.net announced that it focus would be on PHP5 at the end of the year, with only security updates to PHP4 after that time.

July 7th is upon us, and I've got my new theme up.

Mostly.

It still needs some work (like a few sections of the sidebars and some h2 color issues) but I'm pretty much happy with it. I'm not happy with WordPress, though. On the single.php post page, I had the post's date and time in the sidebar, but those only work in The Loop (what I have in the top section.)

Surely there should be a way of calling the date and time outside of the loop.

Just discovered WP-United, a mod for the phpbb forum software that integrates the users of WordPress with phpbb.

It actually seems to be very advanced. I wonder if this will be the standard other forums use for integration.

Check out their Features page to see the details.

Related Posts to Your Feeds is my new favorite plugin for WordPress.

It uses Ultimate Tag Warrior's tagging mechanism to get the related posts then appends them to the feed so when someone views a feed with a feedreader (I just checked it with Netvibes it lists six other posts that are (potentially) related.)

Seriously cool.

I'm looking into a new forum for this site. I'm currently using mybb but want something more integrated with wordpress. Vanilla is an options, as is bbpress (which has a new release.)

So if my forums go down suddenly, I'll be setting up something different.