Changes Coming to HighCallingBlogs

Yep. It's that time again.

Or maybe your thinking, "It's that time again already ?"

Either way it's time for more changes in our little blog network here. I mean it's been over since our last change added Google Friend Connect to the site.

This time we're upgrading our back end. (And no, that doesn't involve liposuction. Sheesh!)

WordPress Upgrade

As most of you know HighCallingBlogs.com is built on the Multi-User version of WordPress (called WordPress MU), which is the public version of the same software that powers WordPress.com .

WordPress released a major new upgrade to their single blog version about a month and a half ago. They invested quite a bit of money on usability studies to make the interface more user friendly. They also conducted a bunch polls of the WordPress community to get user feed back on all sorts of facets of this upgrade. I participated in several.

You see WordPress is serious about making a blogging platform that not only performs well from a technical standpoint, but that also is as easy to use as possible. They worked hard completely overhauling the back end user interface to make things even better.

Lag Time for MU

Unfortunately, the way their development cycle works, there is usually some lag time between the release of a new single blog WordPress version and the corresponding version in MU. Then the holiday season made delayed this version even more than it might otherwise.

The good news is that they released the new version in Beta yesterday. Now Normally we don't make upgrades to HighCallingBlogs until the fully tested version has been publicly released.

However I've been working with development copies of the new version on a couple projects since about Christmas now and I'm confident that all but a very small percentage of the bugs have been worked out of this version.

Besides, y'all are a forgiving bunch when things go a little wonky around here. And I for one especially appreciate that!

Not only that, but we are laying plans in place to convert HighCallingBlogs.com to a full blown social networking site that will include everything we've got now plus a whole lot more. In order to get there we need to be using the new version of WordPress MU anyway.

I'll save any more of the details for another time but let's just say the Google Friend Connect is a tiny taste of where we are going with the site. We have big plans for the site in 2009. As good as things are, they are going to get much better!

Changes This Weekend

All that to say I will be completely overhauling the back end of the site this weekend. For all of you who have your blogs hosted here at HighCallingBlogs.com (i.e. your web address has "http://highcallingblogs.com/" at the beginning of it) you may notice some short interruptions of service during the weekend.

And by the time you get up Monday morning you will see a whole new HighCallingBlogs.com back end.

Of course if your blog is not hosted on our site then none of this current batch of changes will affect you. But don't worry we are making changes that will help all of us interact with other members of the community in a much more meaningful way. So stay tuned!

If you want to see a taste of what the changes look like, take a gander at this video. (Just keep in mind that the bits about plugins and upgrading don't really apply in our case.)

Enjoy!

• Tags:  
• change
• upgrade
• wordpress

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