FLOSS News

If you’ve looked at your WordPress.com blog stats today, you might have noticed the charts look a little different. We’ve replaced the old proprietary chart object with Open Flash Chart, an open source alternative.  Charts now look like this:

(Though I can’t guarantee you’ll see numbers like that).

We’ve responded to your suggestions and requests with some changes to your media upload options.

You can now access all of your uploaded files through your Media Library, which is in your dashboard under the Media menu. Below the Library is Add New, through which you can upload files from your computer or the web.

As always, your blog comes with 3,000 megabytes of space, and the ability to upload images and documents in these file types: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, odt.

I’ll bet you never thought you’d see the day when you looked forward to moderating your comments, but this might just be it. Comment moderation has been vastly improved, with all kinds of little tools and changes to help keep things quick and painless.

The Comments menu of your dashboard has a new, beautiful layout. Above the comments queue, you’ll see options to filter by Pending (formerly known as Awaiting Moderation), Approved, and Spam:

As you may have noticed, there’s a brand new way to post on your dashboard: QuickPress! There are also lots of other tools to help you write and edit drafts and published posts.

QuickPress lets you post the basics straight from your dashboard, without navigating to the Posts menu. The essentials are all there: title, text, tags, and the media toolbar, which lets you add images, videos, music, documents, and polls.

Back in the day (a week ago), what you saw was what you got when it came to your dashboard. Now, you’ve got total freedom to move things around and get rid of the stuff you don’t use.

First, there’s dragging and dropping modules (boxes of content). Just grab the title bar of a module and drag it anywhere to customize your dashboard to your workflow and style. You can even put all your modules in one column, which will stretch them to be twice as wide:

Howdy there bloggers! You’ll no doubt remember that when we acquired Gravatar.com, just over a year ago, we intended to fully integrate it into WordPress.com. It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally replaced the WordPress.com avatar system with those Globally Recognized Avatars. What does this mean? It means your WordPress.com avatar can now follow you around the web. Your avatar can show up on any Gravatar enabled site, regardless of its affiliation with Automattic!