By pete -

We at FTPlanet have some preferred means of getting the info we need. RSS is clearly a big one, and how to manage those RSS feeds? We use Google Reader. Like many Google products, this one is FANTASTIC – and always improving. Today, even more features have been released to turn this into a beast of a social networking tool. You can now “like” items, and sharing is how busted wide open to anyone. Wonder if Facebook is starting to sweat? Check out the updates from Google Reader’s blog..

When we first started improving our sharing features, our goal was to make sharing as simple and flexible as the rest of Reader. Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve made four improvements to give you more sharing control and help you easily find other people’s publicly shared items within Reader.

Find and follow other people

Instead of sharing your items with others and hoping they reciprocate, you can now find people with public shared items and subscribe to their shared items with one click. Use our new people search feature (powered by Google profiles) to look for people who have public shared items. You can browse by name, location, or topic, and start following new people — all from inside Reader… continued at Official Google Reader Blog: Following, liking and people searching.

By pete -

When the new FileTransferPlanet.com launched, we had a big dilemma – that being, to port in all of the old forum material that we had or not to. Literally years and years of information – most of which, unfortunately, was too dated to keep without major revising. We made a decision to start fresh – a very daunting task in this new age of social media. An empty forum is never a good sign to a new visitor. Fortunately, some early adopters have jumped in immediately – which is great! Many thanks to PaulBeugeling, Mike, “chester”, and the others who are making it such a helpful place to chat.

The forums have some new features that we are really pleased with. They are built on BBPress, on a really nice open source platform – and happens to work quite nicely with Wordpress, which powers this blog. There are of course some anti-spam measures in the background, but on the front end we’ve chosen for a “human test” to help make sure its not a dirty robot dropping junk into a post.  We did not want to lock it down too much, however, so creating an account is not necessary – guest posts are more than welcome! Other cool features – if you drop a URL to a Youtube video into a post, the site is smart enough to embed the video (here’s an.. umm, example.. from one of our members) .

A “support forum” is also in placed – if you have a question you really want answered, drop it in there, and you have control over it being marked as “resolved” or not – to keep our experts on the case as long as you need.

Other stuff we have.. RSS is all over the place – subscribe to as much, or as little, as you want.. or even go old school with Email subscriptions to particular threads.

That’s just the start – so head on over! Oh and – once you create an account, it works for both forums and blog comments! Yeah, its that easy. Got ideas? Concerns? Please let us know – either comment here – or heck, even better, start a thread in the forums .

By pete -

File Transfer Planet happily runs on Wordpress – a free, elegant and very powerful blogging platform. Over the last few years, WP has become increasingly popular and at the same time, more advanced and user friendly.

wordpress admin ui

With the release of 2.7, Wordpress had a built in “plugin browser” which allowed on-the-fly plugin installation – where previously you’d have to FTP files to your site. Themes still required FTP however – which I suspect was always a bit of a challenge for novices.

This week, a new version of Wordpress came out that improves on the user experience nicely, and more importantly, allows users to install themes without FTP! This is a pretty big deal, and quite a time saver.

installs on-the-fly - evil?

Is it killing FTP? No way. The plugin and theme browsers are limited to the main Wordpress repository for these items – yet many, many themes and plugins are hosted elsewhere, in other repositories and developer sites. For these types of situations you still need to download, unzip, and FTP your files back to your site. So to really keep your Wordpress blog on the cutting edge – polish those FTP skills. Some of the best plugins and themes are not available via the built in interface!

Did you say you need an FTP Client? We strongly recommend WS_FTP for Windows users, and Fetch for Mac users.. learn and buy them at our online store page.

Interested in learning more about FTP? You certainly came to the right place! Check out our guides, or new forums if you have specific questions. For the record, our forums run on another piece of software by the makers of Wordpress, called BBpress. If you have an account on our blog, it works on the forums as well.

Now – back to WP 2.8!! Here’s a video and info put together for the release:

Major New Improvements

First and foremost, 2.8 is way faster to use. We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.

The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

And Even More

You can read the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the Codex. The list is exhausting!

via WordPress › Blog » 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets.