In preparation for upgrading a whole mess of sites to using the latest version of WordPress I decided it was time to finally upgrade my own site and to implement the new design I’d been working on for a while (for over a year now).

Check it out: www.gabrielserafini.com

Popularity: 15% [?]

I’ve had this domain name for a while and finally built something on it. The idea is to figure out good ways to save money on car insurance. We have USAA for ours, which makes it nice because it is a pretty good rate. Some people need extra help, though, to find the best prices. Hopefully this site will assist them in their search.

Check it out: Car Insurance Connection

It is built using WordPress, and will hopefully pay for itself through the Google Adsense ads.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Our kitchen now has a website (using WordPress of course). Lots more content to come soon, including the secret story of how the river came to be, the inspiration behind the pipes and the amazing triumph of getting everything finally finished.

Visit the site: Serafini Studios Kitchen - Welcome to Kristin and Gabriel’s kitchen.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Found this useful plugin from this site while working on a site that was in the middle of getting dugg/reddited:

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

Get the plugin here: Ricardo Galli, de software libre - WP-Cache 2.0

Popularity: 5% [?]

I’m working on a new site relating to Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act compliance (it will replace the useless site that is currently up at grammleachblileyact.com) and was looking for breadcrumb functionality and a better way to manage outputting links from the Blogroll on the links.php page.

I had searched for a good WordPress breadcrumbs plugin a while ago, and the ones I found didn’t really impress me. I’m really happy with the one I ended up finding this time. It’s called Breadcrumb Navigation XT and it does exactly what I was looking for. I’ll be using this probably for any future needs when it comes to breadcrumbs and WordPress.

The second plugin that I found was related to fixing how WordPress currently outputs links using the default get_links_list() function used in most links.php template pages right now. I had used on the XyzAnt.com links page another WordPress function (wp_list_bookmarks()) that only works for WordPress 2.1 and higher, and is still undergoing active development / documentation. That function, however, only allows you to output the description, and doesn’t appear to include the functionality to show notes. Since there is a larger amount of allowable text for the notes field, and that is what I needed, I still needed to find (or write) a solution to outputting all links, ordered by category, displaying the notes field as well as link title, url, image, etc. This is the plugin that I found that does just this (found it after writing about 80% of the same functionality myself). It does just what I was looking for, shows all the categories that contain links and the links within each category.

Plugin author’s latest post about WordPress 2.1 support: Link Library now supports Wordpress 2.1

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’m happy to announce that Kristin’s new site is now finally live. It’s all converted to a full WordPress site now.

Check it out: Kristin Joy Pratt-Serafini - Award-winning author and illustrator

Popularity: 4% [?]

Looks like it’s time to upgrade again, lots of neat new features and good bug fixes in WordPress 2.2.

WordPress Blog - WordPress 2.2

Download WordPress 2.2 now.

Popularity: 4% [?]

This is a site that we’ve been working on for a while for the Christian Science church in Orinda, California.

Check it out and feel free to visit them sometime if you’re ever in the area.

First Church of Christ, Scientist - Orinda, California - Welcome to our healing church

It’s powered by Wordpress, of course.

Popularity: 3% [?]

And to think, I was just browsing the WordPress Trac repository earlier today looking at their sweet upgrade scripts in /wp-admin/.

Time to upgrade our sites. There are a lot of them. We love WordPress.

It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes. We’re breaking the tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians to congratulate Ryan Boren on his new son (and first WP baby) Ronan.

What’s new? We have about 50 or so bugfixes, which you can review on our dev tracker here, mostly minor bug fixes around feeds, custom fields, and internationalization. If you’d like a nitty-gritty view, check out Mark’s blog post on the changes.

Development Blog - WordPress 2.0.5 - Ronan

Download the latest version of WordPress now (2.0.5)

Popularity: 3% [?]

I’ll be upgrading blog-o-matic.com and Share the Practice with this new release… We should also do Niner Blogs as well, come to think of it.

WordPress MU is an official branch of WordPress that is designed for managing and hosting thousands of blogs instead of just one. It’s the software that powers WordPress.com, for example. MU has been in heavy development for about a year now, and we’ve finally polished it up to a place where we feel like it’s ready for public consumption. Since setup is a bit more complex than the 5-minute install of regular WordPress, MU is best suited for a more server-savvy audience. You can download it on the WordPress MU site.

Development Blog - MU 1.0 and bbPress

Popularity: 3% [?]