Welcome to roseba.com.  I’m back online.  I hope to restablish my presence on the web after a very long hiatus from it.  The intention of this website is to talk tech, and add a little bit of my personality as well.

So why is this post titled, “Hello Benny!”  Well that’s simple. A new major release of WordPress came out just in time for my new website.  His name is Benny.

Benny is impressive. It adds a bunch of new features and I am very pleased. It seems that most of the improvements are designed for backend operations, especially media management. This new version supports embedded video, where in past versions, the best you can do is embed code.  That means you can host your own videos, though I’m not sure why you would want to. However, I’m not a big video person.

The manage media section has seen a remarkable improvement by allowing the administrator to view thumbnails of the media and a few enhancements to filters.  This is a feature that has been needed for a very long time.  In the recent past, I created a website for an artist where the majority of the content was artwork.  I had to install an extra plugin simply to sort the media. I am glad this change was made because it makes things much easier.  Ultimately, the artist went with a different site, focusing only on cosmetics rather than the overall functionality.  I am in the process of rebuilding it with some modifications so I have something to show for all of my hard work.  The changes I have to make have turned it back to a work in progress because I have to rewrite some css in order to accomodate those changes.

Continuing my discussion about the changes to WordPress, I am impressed with the changes to the plugin management and installation screens.  Thumnails and plugin details were added which eliminates the need to review plugins outside of the site interface (which I did often.) These additions improve ones capacity to select plugins because I never want to guess what I’m going to get before I install something.

Today I noticed a new feature that must have been implemented recently.  I can now remove the comments form at the bottom of the post.  In the past, I have created posts that weren’t meant to have comments associated with them.  There didn’t seem to be a way to remove the comment box other than recreating the post from scratch.  That’s silly in my opinion.

I have been using WordPress since almost the beginning of its existance.  I continue to be amazed at the improvements it continues to make.  As a user of Drupal as well, my hat is off to WordPress all the way.