Maintaining the Wordpress blog valid to the declared HTML standard seems to be not very easy if many plug-ins are used. In fact, every plug-in contributes a piece of code to the page and sometimes breaks the HTML validity. Since plug-ins can be upgraded by a simple click in the dashboard, an error can be simply delivered and installed to your Blog. Thus, a re-check in a HML Validator of your choice is desireable after every new plugin upgrade. I prefer to use W3C Validator for checks.

Apparently, I realized running my monthly seitwert-check, that the one of my pages got errors because of one of the plug-in installed. This time it was Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress by Peter Ryan. Instead of using the type="text/javascript" inside of script-tag, the class="javascript" is used. The bug could be easily fixed locally by replacing the corresponding pieces of code. Peter seems to be not interested anymore in maintaining the plug-in, since there is a long list of comments claiming and voting for the bug.

Especially, if you think of the fact, that the usage of invalid (X)HTML effects your page rank by search engines and other directories in a very negative way, such hidden standards violations should be avoided.

Several days ago, the new version of Wordpress “Coltrane” has been released. Because this time it is a major release, I spend some time to introduce the new features. Regarding to the Wordpress Blog: “…the first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version. (Download it now, or read on for more.)…”

Dashboard

The main improvement of the new version is the complete redesign of the dashboard. The structure of it becomes more convenient and clear (especially in contrast to the old versions like 2.3). The new vertical menu bar on the left is separated in three parts: dashboard anchor, authoring actions and settings. classification eases the usage, especially for the authors and editors.

Authoring actions

The authoring actions have a similar classification as in last versions: you will find actions for working with posts, media, links, pages and comments. The corresponding pages has been completely redesigned and use prety much AJAX technology. In the media library, the new items can be uploaded to the library, that allows uploading of items not related to the posts or pages.

Settings

The settings control panel was also a subject of reconstruction. The most important features are: support of web installation of plug-ins (finally, no additional file system access to the server is required), automatic wordpress upgrade (making the InstantUpgrade plug-in absolete).

Upgrade

The upgrade seems to be running without any problems. As usual by major releases you need to run the DB upgrade using a built-in script. It worked fine for this page.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, I recommend the upgrade to the new version. The promise made by the developers in their blog is fulfilled and the blogging systems really operates quicker.  The dashboard redesign seems to be adequate and the features like online-plug-in installation and built-in web update are nice. If you use Google Gears, you can enable caching of most static parts and make the blog run very quickly.