How Healthy is Your WordPress Blog? Do you know what version of PHP or MySQL your server is running?
The improvements in WordPress continue. Check the state of your blog’s health by running the new Health Check plugin. Currently, it will check for the versions of PHP and MySQL that are running your blog. In order to work with WP 3.2, your server will need to be up-to-date and running —
PHP version 5.2 or greater
MySQL version 5.0.15 or greater
In an attempt to help others into the 21st century, WordPress will no longer work using PHP 4 or MySQL 4.
WordPress will also drop support for Internet Explorer 6. Yay! There are other improvements coming, so stay tuned!
When scheduling posts on your WordPress blog, a few of the right plugins can make this job easier and more manageable.
First, use the Dashboard Widget Scheduled Posts plugin. This plugin creates a widget for your WP Dashboard that lists the upcoming posts that are scheduled, but not yet published.
Second, use the Future Posts Calendar plugin. This plugin creates two sets of calendars based on your scheduled posts. One calendar resides in the right column of the New Post page that you’ll see when you’re writing a new post or editing a previous one. The second calendar will be seen by site visitors as it resides in a widget that you can choose to add to a sidebar of your blog.
When there are no scheduled posts, the future calendar on the New Post page will have the current date in bold.
No future posts scheduled at this time.
When at least one post is scheduled for future publication, the future calendar – either on the New Post page or in the blog sidebar – will have differently colored backgrounds depending on the number of posts scheduled for that day.
Posts scheduled to appear on the 20th and 21st on the month.
A green background indicates one post, light blue means two posts and blue means three posts scheduled for that day.
Clicking a date in the calendar will change the scheduled posting date. Nice feature!
If you’re not bothered by editing code, you can alter the PHP file to make a dashboard widget, too.
If you want to ad a widget to your dashboard, uncomment the line add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'fpc_setup_dashboard_widget'); in the future_calendar.php file.
The dashboard widget only shows the date of future posts in the calendar format, so I prefer the Dashboard Widget plugin as it includes post titles.
It takes time to save a post or page that you’re working on to check out the dates that you may have scheduled other posts. Even in WordPress 3.1 the only place to see the dates of scheduled posts is on the Posts page. When you’re working on pages or posts, it would be nice to see at a glance when other content will be posted to the web site.
I reviewed two plugins that were developed to display the scheduled posts as a Dashboard Widget.
Future Dashboard Widget creates a widget for the dashboard that lists the Scheduled Posts by date, including the post titles and first line of content. The entries are listed in reverse time order so the next post to be posted will be at the bottom of the list. A link is provided to see “All Scheduled Posts”.
Dashboard widget of scheduled posts from Future Dashboard Widget plugin.
Note the day, date, time, title and text format with last posting listed first.
Dashboard: Scheduled Posts creates a Scheduled Post widget for the dashboard, but lists the entries in order so that the next post to be published will be listed at the top of the list. A link is provided to see “View All” scheduled posts.
Dashboard widget of scheduled posts from Dashboard: Scheduled Posts plugin.
Note the title, date and text format with first posting listed first.
I’m going to go with the Dashboard: Scheduled Posts plugin. I like the widget format better than that of the Future Dashboard Widget plugin and the order that the posts are listed seems more intuitive. Thanks Viper007!
