As expected, the auto-update to WordPress 3.0 from 2.9.2 was flawless, and took all of 30 seconds.

I continue to love WordPress as a blogging and simple CMS platform!

More volunteer work, but I like the results: I offered to help my local Little League out with their site, and did it all in WordPress. I used the usual suspects for plugins:

• All in One SEO Pack – very well done plugin for moving your site up in search engine responses.
• AWS Easy Page Link – I’m surprised this isn’t core functionality yet. I use this for easy linking between posts and pages.
• Contact Form 7 – along with gmail filtering, this is a great way of directing “contact me!” requests appropriately.
• NextGEN Gallery – good gallery, but in my humble opinion, still missing a lot of useful functions, like the ability to specify whether images in galleries should have descriptions below them.
• Page Links To - must-have if you want to have some menu items point to “nothing”, and other menu items point externally, or to some content.
• reCAPTCHA Form – well done anti-spam mechanism for Contact Me forms and comments.
• WP-Table Reloaded – very nice little Table creation utility.
• WP Google Analytics – you know… for gathering metrics on your site from Google…

All the graphics on the site are custom. I used “Function” as the base theme.

I’ve still got some “to-do” list stuff left-over, but the hard work is done.

I upgraded to 2.9.2 today – it took me all of 1 click and about 45 seconds of waiting, for a major upgrade. No problems, no glitches, nothing.

I love WordPress as a CMS. That is all.

For whatever it’s worth, my upgrade to 2.8 didn’t go completely without issue: even though I reported success, my Gallery plugin had some issues with new the version. A quick “automatic upgrade” fixed my issues with it though. So, feeling empowered by these recent successes, I decided to upgrade to the latest version of my underlying (iNove) theme too. It wasn’t quite as easy as the WordPress update was, but still pretty painless. I had to comment out some PHP, make a handful of CSS changes, and upload a few new images, but overall, things are the way I like them.

The new drag and drop Widgets interface is pretty neat. I don’t like how WordPress (or is it my theme??) handles ‘empty’ sections, though: it assumes that if it’s empty, you really want the default widgets there, like Blogroll. In fact, if it’s empty, that means I want it to be empty! I was able to work around this by rearranging my widgets, but it was a tad bit annoying to start.

In other news, we should be finishing up our pool wiring/lighting project today! I’ll have to make another quick trip to Home Depot, but all the hard stuff is done (base wiring, switches, etc.) and all that’s left is drilling a few holes and pulling cables through conduit. The lights themselves are coming out really nice too – I frosted the glass panes with some Valspar Frosting enamel and mounted them directly to my 5×5 PVC post caps.

A new minor release of WordPress was released about a week ago, and I have been tracking the user response of it so far. Given that everything looks smooth, I went ahead and upgraded. If you’re experienced with upgrading other web-based systems, you know that this process can be painful (in some cases, VERY painful), but with WordPress, it’s as simple as clicking a button – literally. It’s still recommended that you take a backup of your system, but the ease with which a major upgrade can be applied to the system is still a joy to behold. WordPress makes things drop-dead easy, and, as always, it just works.

Re: the pool – we’re almost done! The rain has been keeping the crew from handling a concrete grading issue, and we’re still without a slide for now, but overall, things are looking great! The deck is very nice and our new automatic chlorinator (we switched to a Salt Water system) is chugging away – I can’t wait until I have the opportunity to jump in and give it a shot. Supposedly, salt water pools have a very nice, silky feel to them, in addition to being easier on the eyes and skin – and, of course, not having to put chlorine in is great too!

I’ve taken the opportunity to run some wiring in the pool area, too, so we can have better night-time lighting, and more accessible electrical outlets. It’s definitely been a lot more effort than I expected, but both Mary Lou and I are really liking how it’s all coming together. Pictures of the entire project will be posted soon!