I am certainly finding these “Five” series of posts very educational.  There has been such great discussions around each one and I am learning a lot from all of the experience of the visitors here at the site.  I appreciate your willingness to speak up about what your likes and dislikes.  There is nothing like a spirited conversation and sharing of information to get the brain juices flowing.

So our “Five” for this post is blogroll related plugins for your website.

Feed Reading Blogroll – This plugin uses Googles index of feeds to grab the latest post date and title and display it on your blogroll.  There are several configuration options and it can organize the presentation of the blogroll links in order of the freshness of the latest post.  You will need a free Google API key to use this plugin.

Nofollow Blogroll SEO – This simple plugin puts rel=”nofollow” on non-homepage Blogroll Links. It allows you to share links with your favorite sites but not take a hit in your SEO for having sitewide links. This is a fairly new plugin in the development cycle but due to its simplicity is not likely to require a lot of development down the road.

Better Blogroll – Collecting a lot of links in your blogroll to the point they take up an entire sidebar?  Well this plugin is the solution to that problem.  It allows you to specify a specific number of blogroll links to display in your sidebar and then it randomly fills that from your entire collection of blogroll links.  So it keeps things fresh and shares the link love! This has several other features that just give added benefits to the plugin such as image links, displaying the links category and setting links to no follow. This is one of the more popular ones with almost 9,400 downloads to date.

Advanced Blogroll – This plugin allows you to display your blogroll links by category; order them by name, link ID or randomly; display with text links only, graphics only or both; select how many links to show and also opt to add the no follow attribute to the links.

Google Reader Blogroll Widget – This one lets you grab your Google Reader subscription and display it in your sidebar as a blogroll – you can even use the custom Google color schemes in your sidebar display for it.

I look forward to seeing what you use for blogrolls in the comments. Thanks and stay safe out there on the net!

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, has confirmed that a

WordPress application for the BlackBerry will be released soon. This application will prove to be a boon for those BlackBerry owners who want to post something quickly but have no immediate access to a laptop. There aren’t any more details available as to the exact functions but it probably will be similar to the iPhone app.

Currently there exists an add-on that provides a mobile-friendly web interface, but it has many shortcomings. The application from BlackBerry will permit liveblogging and quick edits and coupled with the fact that the BlackBerry keyboard is ideal for writing; it seems possible that even full drafts can be written while on the go.

There is no information about the features which will be included in the

WordPress BlackBerry application or when the application will

be released.The iPhone

Wordpress application has apparently received considerable amount of popularity, thus the chances of success on the BlackBerry increases. Since the release date hasn’t been disclosed as yet, its only a wait that could let us know where this application stands in terms of popularity and success.

WordPress 2.8 is the latest installment of the WordPress platform, scheduled to be released on Wednesday, June 10. Millions of sites are powered by WordPress including the BBC, CNN, the NFL, the New York Times blogs, and that’s just a few of the big names.

Ok, so there’s a new version.  So what?  There are a number of massive improvements which will make WordPress even easier to use than before, however most of the new features are under the hood. Mark Jaquith, a core WordPress developer, is calling it the “Snow Leopard of WordPress” – in other words, on the surface, it doesn’t have much new but there are radical updates under the hood to make it run faster and give developers more options.

Faster Load Times

The first, of smaller features, but very important features to me, is the ability to compress both external CSS files and embedded CSS, and the same with Javascript, both embedding and external files. Why is this important? It decreases both load time for the user and saves bandwidth because of compression. It’s a win-win situation for everyone. But, this is just one of the major enhancements I’m excited about.

Now Easier to use Widgets

Yay for a new widget panel!  No more “add this widget” and gets added and having to browse the different sidebars.  Now you can drag and drop, and auto-save, on any of the registered sidebars for your theme.  See below for the example of what it looks like.  It’s a lot more useful and much easier to use now.

Plugins, Plugins, Plugins, Plugins

The second major update that is clear to see is the plugins page layout.

I run a test site that updates code every few hours from SVN so I can see what is going on with all the new code being developed and committed, so something I noticed quickly was that the Plugins page layout changed dramatically. You’ll notice that the way the plugins are grouped together now is different than it was before. With the upgraded Plugins layout, it was quite difficult to see the important plugins, so the lead developer working on it, Ryan Boren, was kind enough to add a “Per Page” option for Plugins. Now, you can easily find all your plugins on a single page by changing the Per Page option to a higher number than the plugins you have. For example, I have 55 plugins installed, so I set mine to 60 and I can easily see all my plugins.

Plugin Search

Another great addition to the WordPress codebase in 2.8 is enhanced plugin search.  For a long time, and still, plugin search is not that great.  2.8 will help fix a lot of those issues and give users a greater opportunity to find what they are looking for.

New Admin Schemas

Diving into some of the admin features, the blue color scheme received some love and has some updated features. The grey color scheme’s icons were also updated. Overall, the admin style has stayed the same though, since Automattic conducted the user experience testing back in October 2008 to draw up a new administration theme. Have they done a good job? I honestly think that yes, they’ve done a great job with it and it’s fully functional now. I was hesitant at first when they made the big change, but I really like it now.

Along with upgrading the admin schema, you can now select how many columns you want to display.  It’s really easy to move the various dashboard widgets around to customize the dashboard to exactly how you want it.   You can easily select which widgets you want to show too.  Whether you care about plugins, recent news, or you just care about posting quickly, you can edit it to your liking.

Search for Themes

Not only was the plugins browsing area upgraded, but you can also now view and search for themes!

Can’t Upload with Flash? Let’s Fix That!

For all those users that were having issues with Flash, Firefox, and uploading images, those problems should go away.  WordPress 2.8 comes with PHP SWFUpload 2.2.0.1.

Editors Note: I wish the Flash uploader would be applied to more than just images. For instance, the WordPress importer could use some love – particularly for large export files.

Automattic Highlights

A few of the highlights that Automattic is pointing out is the new ability to drag and drop, and save, in one action, widgets for your theme. IIS 7.0 URL rewriting is now supported as well, giving a little love to the Windows users. These are just a few of the highlights.

Editors Note: If you use the Thesis theme there are some incompatibilities. Anthony Ferguson has the fix in advance of an official update from DIYThemes.

Upgrading Using the SSH Method

If you’re into really quick plugin upgrades, you might already be using a script running on a cron job that upgrades your plugins every few hours.  But, there’s a slightly less geeky way of doing it.  The SSH2 method of upgrading is now more functional.  It had some problems in 2.7.x, so I helped work with the developer of that area and we made it more functional and operational.  I wrote a tutorial about how to upgrade WordPress and plugins using SSH that works seemlessly.  For my personal blog, I just click upgrade and the next screen I see is that it upgraded successfully.  I never have to enter my username or password.  It’s all stored on the server.

Other Updates

Digging into the nitty gritty, the backend received some updates as well. Dropping some database columns, for those of us that are uber geeky, which will help keep the database running smoother and cleaner. For the full list of geeky updates, check out the Development, Themes, and Plugins updates.