Most people that start a blog would like it to turn profitable at some point, but how does it happen? WebProNews recently spoke with blogging legend Darren Rowse of ProBlogger about what bloggers can do to make money.

First of all, bloggers need to look at their blog long-term.  So often, people think that they can make money instantly, but it could actually take years.

Having a profitable blog also involves finding the right niche.  It needs to be something that you are interested in and have a passion about. In addition, Rowse suggests that you determine how monetizable your niche is. To do this, you could search for your topic in Google and see if it is something advertisers would consider.

To keep visitors coming back to your blog, you must also choose a niche that will keep you writing for a long time. How often should you write? While it depends upon your area of content, Rowse does point out that, “every post you write is a doorway into your site.” For some bloggers, this could mean 365 opportunities if they write a post everyday. However, bloggers should not post for the mere reason of having new content every day. He says the content should always be useful.

On another note, how effective are blogs due to the recent Twitter craze? Although some blogs have shifted to shorter formats, Rowse says there is also a shift that is moving back toward longer content on blogs since people want more than 140 characters.  Emphasizing that blogs and Twitter are valuable tools for each other, he says specifically, “It’s an ideal world for a blogger… people want more and you’re able to give it to them through a viral communication like Twitter.”

espinda.com provides a turn-key blog plan at only $3.5 a month.

If you took advantage of our new offer for migrating to a Washington DC server then you’ll need to re-create email accounts on the new server, therefore your old email accounts will be closed, you can backup your existing mail in these mailboxes using Outlook, here’s a brief tutorial on how to do so:

1. Click ‘Account Settings’ from ‘Tools’ menu.

2. Create a new Account (per mailbox).

3. Select the 1st choice.

4. Check the checkbox at the bottom.

5. Select ‘Internet E-mail’.

6. Fill in the form as above then select ‘More Settings’.

7. Click on ‘Outgoing Server’.

8. Click the first checkbox.

9. POP: 110 and SMTP: 225

Then click OK, NEXT and FINISH, then repeat the above steps for each mailbox, finally click ‘Send/Receive button in Outlook to download all mail stored in your existing mailboxes before they got deleted, when you change your DNS you’ll be able to use your new email accounts with new setup that will be given in your new activation email.

Links are still the key differentiator to move the needle forward once you have some initial traction in the search engine results. Unlike some past algorithmic update shakeups, Caffeine is not targeted to changing the criteria of links and other off-page factors. Rather, the on-page factors of a site are the variables in play.

Successful SEO is still very much the same in the post-Caffeine world. Only more so. In order for links to be most effective, they must be directed towards pages on sites which are quick to load, efficient in their coding, architected to facilitate a flatter crawl structure, and featuring a high percentage of unique target relevant content. To this last point, be assured that if your site has volumes of pages that contain repurposed content or largely redundant templated content, Caffeine will definitely not be your friend.

Too Much Caffeine Got You Nervous?

Caffeine is fundamentally a big change for Google, and invariably you will see fluctuation (positive and negative) in your organic search rankings. This fluctuation will be driven by the extent to which your site is more or less compliant to the aforementioned factors vs. your competitor sites. Understanding why rankings for you and your competition change in the upcoming weeks is the key first step to ensure your reactions and responses are appropriate and effective.

You may have further questions. I have spoken personally with many Text Link Ads clients about auditing their sites for Caffeine optimization, as well as redefining their SEO to adjust to changing factors and emphasis. Our Text Link Ad link specialists are available to answer your questions and can also provide an overview of the benefits of our strategic and technical consulting services.

Is it Good or Bad?

When algorithms change, rankings change. It’s as simple as that. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing: search engine optimization is a zero sum game…there are exactly ten results that will always show up in the top ten. So, one site’s loss is another site’s gain. What can you do to make sure you are on the beneficiary side of this update? First and foremost, you must understand the essential elements of Caffeine.

What is Caffeine?

What is Caffeine? How will it affect search results? How does link building fit into the mix? What can you do to prepare for Caffeine? While we are not sitting in the Google kitchen, we have been shown a preview of what is cooking.

First and foremost, the name provides significant insight. Why Caffeine? The new update focuses on speed and sharper focus. Fewer search results served up faster. To do this, Google is completely rewriting their indexing system to crawl faster, index more efficiently, and serve up fewer results much more quickly. Content freshness will (finally) start to play the more important role it deserves; old outdated and stale content will be more readily expunged. Our explorations into Caffeine results here at Text Link Ads have shown a reduction in the result set of anywhere from 30-70%!

Whilst studies show that the majority of business owners today realise the importance of having a presence on the Internet, it appears that a great many do no more than publish their website. The survey of 430 small local businesses using a website, found that over 40 per cent currently do not use data to assess whether their website is working to support their business goals. During the first half of 2009, the vast majority of SMEs (83 per cent) have not analysed their websites performance against their business plan.

Despite half of businesses feeling happy with their websites and 43 per cent viewing these as integral to their marketing efforts, it would appear that a great many firms simply do not know whether their website is making the right impact. Only 57 per cent of firms do monitor their website performance by checking an overall traffic volume statistic for their homepage. However, only 40 per cent currently analyse where their website visitors are being referred from, an essential element of effective online marketing. Furthermore, only 33 per cent of owners that measure their website look at the click-through rates to individual sections of the website. This exercise can be invaluable in enabling a business to see where consumer interest lies and whether visits are being converted into sales.

In today’s difficult economic climate, the web has never been more relevant for every type of UK enterprise. However, a huge number of firms continue to invest blindly in a web presence without checking whether it is earning its keep. Irrespective of the scale of web project, every business will benefit from using simple statistics to monitor efficiencies and ensure that every visitor is being capitalised upon.

It is perhaps unsurprising over three quarters of businesses questioned (77 per cent) make no assessment of ‘return on investment’ for their websites. Only 11 per cent of those surveyed, judged the effectiveness of their website in terms of ‘clicks vs sales’ or ‘web cost per order’. Worryingly, the research would suggest that for a significant number of companies, expectations for their website are rather low. 1 in 4 owners (23 per cent) still do not believe their website has potential to be a sales channel. Since setting up their website, the majority of companies surveyed (62 per cent) have not taken any external advice about the effectiveness of their website.

However, nowadays easy-to-use tools are available for any business owner to evaluate the effectiveness of their website themselves. For example, espinda.com LLC provides its hosting customers with a MatrixStats tool, a graphical web statistics tool that provides an instant snapshot of how well websites and domains are performing. Within a few clicks, business users can view their website in a range of useful ways – traffic by geographic location, referrer URLs, search engine keyword referrals, page popularity and visitor session lengths. Day-to-day, such tools can be a valuable asset for swiftly identifying problems with web design or navigation.

By taking note of their website statistics and making necessary changes, many companies we work with enjoy a real fiscal impact. With increased visibility and sales from a successful website, a business owner will grow faith in online markets and the role they can play in achieving a business plan.

Some of the most buzzworthy features of 3.5 are its performance features. It leaves a smaller footprint, which means that it uses less of your computer’s memory while it is running. Firefox has also improved their graphics engine with improved Color Profile Support which, depending on the quality of your monitor, will make your images more crisp and vibrant. On top of that, page load is faster and memory management has been improved by continuously cleaning up any unused memory, but the top performance feature Firefox has added is the Super Speed feature. With Super Speed the browser is 3 times faster than Firefox 3 and 10 times faster than Firefox 2.

The new browser is also fully customizable. It has over 6,000 add-ons, which is a tremendous improvement from previous versions. In addition to being able to mold Firefox to fit your personal style, you can add different search engines, edit toolbar preferences, form the navigation buttons to your liking, and a multitude of other customization features.

The location bar, referred to as the Awesome Bar, has also been drastically improved. It now allows quicker navigation to the sites you like to visit, you can simply type in a site you’re looking for and it delivers all matching results. This feature is particularly useful for those hard to remember URLs. The Awesome Bar also offers one-click bookmarking and improved tagging.

Firefox 3.5 has a lot of handy features, but beware that compatibility has been an issue for some people, so before you upgrade be sure it is compatible with everything you need to run. Here we have just touched on several of the newest improvements but there are still many many more. To here more about these features watch the video above, and you can download Firefox 3.5 for yourself here.

Manage E-mail accounts

Not only can user create email accounts but manage them and prevent SPAM with Spam Assassin, access email though several webmail interfaces and several more functions to complete the user’s email experience.

Access Files with web based FTP

Devoted to the security and importance of website files cPanel offer a backup function with a wizard to help safely copy and store files in case they are lost or destroyed. Furthermore user has a direct connection to files with a FTP function allowing the user to manage, upload or download files directly from the web browser.

Limited Stats

With over 8 statistical applications such as Webalizer, Bandwidth monitoring, Latest Visitors and Analog Stats and Error Log the user can monitor all aspects of the website. Statistics graphics are quite simple reporting according to basic values like monthly hits, files and hits they fill the need of the common user. cPanel logs section is thus a bit limited in giving information about the website.

Your website on Your terms

cPanel user has a variety of secure settings to choose between. Offering secure file transfer and remote logins with SSH, IP Blocking, Password Protection, message encryption and decryption using private key with GnuPG Keys.

Control, add and redirect domains

Park, redirect, add or create subdomains with just a few easy steps. Video tutorials are available to all functions enabling user to understand the process completely before attempting to use desired functions.

MySQL and PHPMyAdmin Databases

User can access, add, remove and manage databases in MySQL both directly through cPanel but also by using the Remote MySQL function. phpMyAdmin is also available.

Easy Blog and CMS installation

One of the most valuable functions are found under Software/Services, add-ons offering pre-installed CGI Scripts allowing users to display anything from a counter, clock, countdown timer, formMail to a search engine and banners. Probably the most known service is Fantastico available to help the user install blogs (WordPress, Nucleus, b2evolution), content managagement (Joomla, PHP-Nuke, Drupal etc.), forums, ecommerce, image galleries and much more. PHP configuration is also available.

Video tutorials and Wizards

To make sure that the user find everything and is 100% pleased with the cPanel interface the user have complete access to the control panel preferences and know-how. Video tutorials and wizard to get started and editable style, language and profile settings to give user full control, you can view detailed and step-by-step video tutorials of cPanel provided by espinda here:

for RV skin: http://www.espinda.com/clients/knowledgebase/10/CPanel-RVskin

for X3 skin: http://www.espinda.com/clients/knowledgebase/9/CPanel-X-skin 

Futhermore the user can choose to customize control panel and website further. Personal error pages can be created, image display can be managed and command and scripts can be set to activate and deactivate at specific times.

What’s a static HTML page?
The classic static web page is generated from an actual page ‘physically’ located on the server: so if you had a page named static-page.html somewhere on your server you could find and download this page (it exists, you could grab it via FTP).

The very first websites all used static HTML pages and so the first search engines cut their teeth on static web pages.

What’s a dynamically generated web page?
As the web developed a new way to generate websites arrived, dynamically generated web pages. They differ from static pages in that there is no ‘physical’ equivalent to the page you may be viewing on the server (so you can’t directly download it via FTP).

Dynamically generated pages in it’s simplest form is a single template page that’s used to generate an entire website (could be 1,000,000 page site). Since dynamic pages use scripting languages like PHP and ASP the template will be named after that language for example dynamic-page.php.

This one template page can then be used to create a theoretical unlimited number of unique (unique content) pages each with a unique dynamically generated URL. A simple example would be a 100 page site with each page generated with the format below-

dynamic-page.php?page=1
dynamic-page.php?page=2
dynamic-page.php?page=3
dynamic-page.php?page=4
dynamic-page.php?page=5
…
…
dynamic-page.php?page=100

None of the pages above exist ‘physical’, they are all generated from the single dynamic-page.php page using server-side scripting (PHP in this example). The content from each page could come from a MySQL database, updating the database also updates the website content. Editing the dynamic-page.php changes the entire site.

Many new to web sites looking to go dynamic become confused when they can’t find a page like dynamic-page.php?page=4 on their server (FTP) to edit and post to forums asking how to find them

Why use dynamically generated content?
There are many benefits to dynamically generated websites, this site for example uses the WordPress CMS (Content Management System) which creates dynamically generated pages with a very easy to use back-end for adding and editing content on the fly (any fool can create a site using WordPress and many do!).

A user of WordPress types/pastes content into a text editor like web page (similar to Word), gives it a relevant title etc… clicks a publish button and within seconds the page is available on the website with links from any relevant sections automatically created. Add a new section to the site and the CMS automatically creates a link from the menu, so visitors to the site have immediate access to the new section.

This is just the tip of the ice berg of what’s possible with dynamically generated content, this site uses a WordPress plugin that automatically links phrases to a relevant page (the phrase “Text Links” automatically links to a relevant page and “SEO Consultant” to another page).

To do this with static HTML pages could involve hours of manual editing, though there are ways to simplify the process for example using server-side includes so the menu code (the menu links) are held in a separate file (edit one file, whole site updated). But even with includes and similar techniques static HTML sites (especially large sites) are far more time consuming to maintain than a well thought out dynamically generated site.

Now you know why smart webmasters use dynamically generated sites now we’ll deal with how the search engines, especially Google handle dynamic sites.

Search Engines and Dynamic Sites
In the early days Google etc… could only handle simple URLs like static-page.html and choked on URLs like dynamic-page.php?page=1.

As more and more websites went dynamic the major search engines played catch up, first being able to deal with simple constructs like dynamic-page.php?page=1 and later the more complex dynamic URLs like-

dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&page=1
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&page=2
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&page=3

In the example above we now have 2 variables, a section and a page.

Search engines like Google at first could only handle a small number of variables, wasn’t that long ago when Google would choke on 4 or more variables in a dynamic URL-

dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&sub=Spiders&Bot=Googlebot&page=1
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&sub=Spiders&Bot=Googlebot&page=2
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&sub=Spiders&Bot=Googlebot&page=3

And so it was advisable to limit the number of variables passed.

Right now Google and the other major search engines can handle multiple variable URLs, not unusual to find 4+ variables in an indexed page and so there is no SEO reason NOT to use dynamic URLs since they can and will be fully spidered and indexed just like any static HTML page.

That said there’s two reasons for avoiding dynamic URLs, the first isn’t a big deal, so I’ll deal with it first.

Dynamic Sites are Spidered Slower than Static Sites
Google in particular has made it clear dynamic sites are spidered slower than static sites. The reason for Google to do this are webmaster friendly, dynamically generated sites can potentially have unlimited pages and so Google assumes a dynamic looking site (a site with URLs like dynamic-page.php?page=1) is big and slows the crawl speed. It does this to limit server load because if a dynamic site (any site) has millions of pages, Googlebot and the other spiders could cause the server to crash if they spidered too many pages at one time.

The above has happened to my server, I use many dynamically generated sites, one script in particular uses Amazon’s XML feed to generate an Amazon affiliate store with millions of Amazon products. I have quite a lot of these stores, so potentially tens of millions of pages spidered by Google etc…

I use something called mod_rewrite to convert dynamic URLs to appear static (an SEO technique) in a web browser or search engine spider, so to Google on my server it finds tens of millions of static looking pages which it spiders at full speed!

This has brought my server to it’s knees at times and I’ve had to take measures to slow Googlebot and other spiders!

For an average user though the slower spidering won’t impact SERPs to a great degree, your new pages may take a day or two longer to be indexed, but they’ll get there eventually and when indexed will gain what ever SERPs they deserve.

For this reason if you have a dynamically generated site that’s regularly indexed by Google etc… it’s wise to keep things as they are.

SEO Pros and Cons of Dynamic vs Static HTML
If you are starting a new site and want the most traffic out of Google etc… then filenames are important and static HTML pages are very easy to name for maximum SEO effect.

You create a new page and give it a filename like-

best-seo-filename-in-the-world.html

An equiveleint dynamic URL might look like-

index.php?page=best+seo+filename+in+the+world

or even-

index.php?page=1

To Google all are spiderable/indexed, but the first one is the best because Google takes all words it recognises from a URL and uses that in the rankings algorithm.

Google treats hyphens (-), plus (+), equal (=) and dot (.) as a word separator so it reads the URLs above as-

1. best seo filename in the world html

2. index php? page best seo filename in the world

3. index php? page 1

The first has 7 recognisable words and one (html) is wasted (and you don’t have to use html).

The second has 9 recognisable words and three (index php? page) are wasted.

The third has 4 recognisable words and all four (index php? page 1) are wasted.

Wasted meaning not part of the keyphrase this page is targeting.

As you can see the HTML version is the best because it is so easy to manipulate and the dynamic URLs can range from terrible to not too bad.

An SEO consultant wants the most out of each and every page, so when I create a site I try to make all filenames SEO friendly, but I also like to use dynamic sites because they save so much time in managing content and this is where mod_rewrite rears it’s ugly little head!

Mod_rewrite an SEO Consultants Nightmare
The hours I’ve spent converting dynamic URLs into static looking URLs through mod_rewrite is my own little hell, one tiny mistake and nothing works! But get it right and you can convert ugly SEO unfriendly dynamic URLs into SEO friendly static like filenames that Google etc… loves.

Not going to try to explain in this article how to use mod_rewrite, so open up Google type in mod_rewrite and have fun

If you find mod_rewrite is beyond your skill set, take a look at WordPress CMS, designed as a blogging platform, but very easy to convert to a general CMS (the SEO Consultant Services site uses WordPress, just remove the monthly archive from the menu). Out the box WordPress creates dynamic looking URLs, but with a few clicks of a mouse they can be converted (easily) to the URLs you see with this site.

Note: mod_rewrite is for Apache servers only, espinda provides web hosting on Apache-driven servers.

Highlights
- New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
- Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
- Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
- Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
- Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
- Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
- Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
- Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

New Features
- New Theme Installer routines
- Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
- Add Documentation(function) lookup to Theme and Plugin editors
- Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
- Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
- Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
- Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
- Don’t notify post author of own comments
- Fix comment paging for static front page
- Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
- Make titles into links in Dashboard Right Now module (this was in 2.7.1)
- Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
- Update Blue Admin Color Scheme
- Press This improvements UI, quoting fixes, plus ability for Contributors to use Press This
- Add a Cancel Upload button and a Delete link to Administration > Media > Add New
- Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
- Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
- Improved Widget user interface
- Allow editing of all plugin files
- Improved Plugin search (this was in 2.7.1) on Administration > Plugins > Add New
- Per Page option for plugins
- Move “Install a plugin in .zip format” to new Upload tab under Administration > Plugins > Add New
- Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
- Fix tags suggest for post quick edit and bulk edit
- Permalink editor changes and fix for pages
- Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
- Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
- Support more than one gallery on the same page
- Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
- Overhaul of LiveJournal importer (also add define WP_IMPORTING)
- Import category descriptions for Administration > Tools > Import > WordPress
- Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
- Check for new version when visiting Administration > Tools > Upgrade
- In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
- Fix most popular link category list
- Add description field for Tags in Administration > Posts > Tags
- WAI-ARIA landmark roles to added to WordPress Default theme
- “Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
- Remove My Hacks option from Administration > Settings > Miscellaneous
- Hide email addresses from low privilege users on Administration > Comments
- Allow case-insensitive logins
- Login and Registration pages noindex followed
- Give login screen proper iPhone viewport
- Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
- Make user_nicenames unique during registration
- Add “Send this password to the new user by email” option to Administration > Users > Add New
- Don’t set user’s Website url to http:// in Administration > Users > Add New
- Add password strength meter to Add User and Edit User
- Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
- Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
- Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers

Development, Themes, Plugins
- Improved database performance
- Drop post_category column from wp_posts table, and link_category column from wp_links schemas
- Fix delete statements to ensure data integrity when innodb and foreign keys are used
- Enforce consistent ID types to allow for foreign keys to be defined between tables
- Add Sticky to list of post states
- Add a filter to the post states list
- Introduction and widespread use of transient and related filters
- Add filters so AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber IM labels, in user profile, can be changed
- Add hook “after_db_upgrade”
- Add hooks for the Users, Categories, Link Categories, Tags and Comments table columns
- HTTP API updates and fixes
- Add support for blocking all outbound HTTP requests
- Updated List of HTTP status codes
- Use SimplePie for widget and dashboard feeds
- Switch to pomo lib. Support gettext contexts. Deprecate long form functions
- TinyMCE 3.2.4.1
- Use Jcrop 0.9.8 for cropping
- Update pclzip to 2.8
- Update PHPMailer to 2.0.4
- Update SWFUpload to 2.2.0.1
- Improved performance for script loading
- Improved archive and calendar queries
- Cron spawning improvements
- Timezone enhancements for PHP 5
- Add WP_Widget class and move native widgets into WP_Widget
- Allow other taxonomies (e.g. post categories) to be used with wp_tag_cloud (Changeset 10554)
- Add echo argument to wp_tag_cloud()
- Allow a plugin to control how many posts are displayed on edit pages
- Add “style” and “html” arguments to wp_list_authors (Ticket 4420)
- Add “exclude_tree” argument to wp_list_categories and make exclude behave like exclude_tree when hierarchical is specified–this was actually a 2.7.1 change (Ticket 8614)
- New Template Tag, the_modified_author (Ticket 9154)
- Enhanced support for custom taxonomies
- Put page title before blog name in admin title (Ticket 9028)
- Use https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ for the WordPress.org secret-key service
- Various phpDoc updates
- Refactor filters to avoid potential XSS attacks
- XMLRPC improvements
- Improved mysql2date coding
- Make authentication more pluggable
- Switch to using the ID when calling get_avatar internally to support caching plugins
- Allow plugins to provide a canonical redirect_url even if WordPress does not provide its own
- Drafts have post_date populated now, so look for a zeroed out post_date_gmt to determine non-scheduled nature
- Fixes to query_posts (obey post_type, drop orderby=category, use group by for meta key queries, remove meta_value from selected fields)
- New orderby=none parameter for use with query_posts
- Allow a plugin to filter the classes applied in wp_list_pages()
- Functions (get_adjacent_post_rel_link() and adjacent_post_rel_link()) to display relational links for adjacent posts in the head (Ticket 8703)
- Add the sticky post grey background to the default theme
- Proxy support
- Let a plugin filter the expanded capabilities returned by map_meta_cap
- Allow the update period to be filtered in RSS/RDF feeds
- Store field types in wpdb object
- Add tag description functions tag_description and term_description
- Add page class to get_body_class()
- Deprecate get_catname()
- Use comments_open() and pings_open() in WordPress Default and Classic themes
- Add wp_trim_excerpt() filter
- Consolidate plugin/theme/core upgrade/install functions
- Add page-id-x class to body for pages
- Return empty list in wp_list_bookmarks() if requested bookmark category does not exist
- Allow menu reordering via plugin
- Add hook for updating user profile
- Add redirect argument to wp_loginout
- Add wp_lostpassword_url (Ticket 9932)
- Add get_the_author_meta() and the_author_meta() functions
- Deprecate the_author_ID, the_author_login, the_author_firstname, the_author_lastname, the_author_nickname, the_author_email, the_author_url, the_author_aim, the_author_yim, the_author_mns, the_author_description and all their “get_*()” functions. (The full list at wp-includes/deprecated.php)
- Let plugins use screen layout columns
- Add labels to titles and text inputs
- Add hook for adding info to plugin update message
- Don’t do core version check from front page loads
- Allow a plugin to vary the comment cookie lifetime (or even remove the cookies altogether)
- Allow plugin to replace just the default help while preserving the contextual help
- New escaping naming convention Ticket 9650
- Deprecate wp_specialchars() in favor of esc_html(). Encode quotes for esc_html() as in esc_attr(), to improve plugin security (ref. Development Updates)
- Deprecate sanitize_url() and clean_url() in favor of esc_url_raw() and esc_url() (ref. Development Updates)
- Add number/offset arguments to get_pages() (same parameters can be used for wp_list_pages()
- Make login more pluggable
- Add the_widget() function to output a generic widget anywhere in a template (Ticket 9701)
- Allow plugins to override tz support enable/disable
- Fix combining category and tag queries
- Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
- Recognize Expression Web 2 as IIS
- Allow multiple search form templates
- Introduce sanitize_html_class() and use it to give categories, tags, users etc meaningful classnames where possible but fallback to the id if necessary
- Allow a different role to be set for users when they are created in a call to wp_insert_user()
- Improve Filesystem method choice for ‘direct’; introduce FS_METHOD constant
- Add a hook in print_footer_scripts as in print_head_scripts
- Add a comment_moderation_headers filter
- Move upload_dir filter to before directory is created, so plugins can have a better effect
- Pass name to sidebar, footer, and header get actions
- Upgrader improvements, including move curl to last position and fockopen to 2nd position due to higher compatibility
- Add filter ‘the_content_more_link’ allows adding style/rel/title attributes to the more link
- Updated Trac

Advanced Features
JS script loader Improvements
- jQuery 1.3.2
- Improvements to the script loader: allows plugins to queue scripts for the front end head and footer, adds hooks for server side caching of compressed scripts, adds support for ENFORCE_GZIP constant (deflate is used by default since it’s faster)
- Load the minified versions of the scripts by default, define(‘SCRIPT_DEBUG’, true); can be used to load the development versions
- Remove events from categories checkboxes in quick edit to speed up page unload
- Make simple form validation and ajax-add new categories compatible with jQuery 1.3.1
- Load farbtastic.js has to be loaded in the head
- Note: see Lester Chan’s Loading Javascript in Footer blog and Andrew Ozz’s Script Loader Updates blog

New Widgets API
WP_Widget is a class that abstracts away much of the complexity involved in writing a widget, especially multi-widgets.

- Basically, you extend WP_Widget with your own class that provides a constructor and three methods — widget(), form(), and update().
- widget() – outputs the actual content of the widget.
- update() – processes options to be saved.
- form() – outputs the options form.
- A widget is registered by passing the name of the widget class to register_widget().
- All widgets written with WP_Widget are multiple instance capable.
- Options
- Options for old single-instance widgets ported to WP_Widget will be upgraded to the new multi-option storage format, which is simply a multi-dimensional array keyed by instance ID.
- Options for widgets using the old multi-instance pattern should work as is.
- If your widget has custom option storage needs, you can provide your own get_settings() and save_settings() methods.
- The WP_Widget source can be viewed here (read the phpdoc for moreinfo on usage): http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/wp-includes/widgets.php
- You can see examples of how to use it here: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/wp-includes/default-widgets.php
- If you author any widgets, try porting them to WP_Widget and give your feedback on what can be improved an Trac Ticket 8441.
- Props to the MultiWidget class, on which WP_Widget is based: http://blog.firetree.net/2008/11/30/wordpress-multi-widget/
- The above extracted from Ryan Boren’s wp-hackers post.
See also Widgets API.

Menu reordering via plugin
- Example plugin demonstrates menus with Dashboard, Posts, and Comments in the first menu group. The remaining menus follow in their usual order.
- When filtering the order array, any menus that are not mentioned in the array will be sorted after ones that are mentioned.
- Unmentioned menus are sorted in their usual order, relative to other unmentioned menus.