Aaron Brazell has posted a great post titled 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6, it’s worth a read to learn about the great new features in this release.

For a visual tour of the new release, please watch the following video:

We hope you enjoy blogging with this latest upgrade to WordPress. If you experience any issues that you suspect are related to this upgrade, please submit a support ticket.

Thank you for your support of our PressHarbor Service!

For any account you want to cancel, please click the Magnifying Glass icon and on the following page, click the [Click to cancel this hosting package] link.

For more information about these updates, please see the release announcements:

• WordPress 2.5
• WordPress 2.5.1

WordPress 2.5.x introduces some major changes from previous versions. Most notably, the control panel has been completely redesigned. Some links which may help you transition to the new version:

• WordPress 2.5 Revealed and Compared to Version 2.3.x
• 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5

We hope you enjoy blogging with this fantastic upgrade to WordPress. If you experience any issues that you suspect are related to this upgrade, please submit a support ticket.

Thank you for your support of our PressHarbor Service!

As noted on the Wordpress Dev Blog, now would be a good time to update your password. Changing your password frequently is a good security practice. Always use strong passwords. What is a strong password? Check out Microsoft’s Strong passwords: How to create and use them, it’s a good primer on password security.

All PressHarbor blogs have been running the pre-release version of WordPress 2.3 until tonight, and we’ve just upgraded all blogs to the release version  of 2.3.

Please enjoy blogging with this new release!

At PressHarbor, your site will automatically receive WordPress security updates and your version of WordPress is not affected by any of the issues in this release.

For your information, you are currently hosted on the 2.3 series of WordPress; our service has been running this series since July 2007. When the 2.3 version of WordPress is released later this month, we will continue to follow this branch and maintain regular updates to your site along the 2.3 branch.

To be able to access your domain before you make the DNS changes which will allow the world to see it on its new server, you can make a change to your local DNS settings so that your computer will see the domain at its future home.

Mac OS X

Open the Terminal application and type:

sudo pico -w /etc/hosts

You will see some text like the following:

##

# Host Database

#

# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface

# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.

##

127.0.0.1       localhost

255.255.255.255 broadcasthost

::1             localhost

Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move to the bottom of the file. Enter the following:

123.456.78.90             domain.com

123.456.78.90             www.domain.com

where 123.456.78.90 is the IP address sent in the Hosting Order Status message sent to you when your hosting account was created, and of course domain.com is your own domain name. The white space between the IP address and the domain is a tab.

Hit Control-O and the editor will prompt you with:

File Name to Write: /etc/hosts

Hit Return to save the file, then Control-X to exit the editor. Now type this into the Terminal:

lookupd -flushcache

Quit your web browser and reopen it, and you will now be able to view your PressHarbor account even though you have not changed the DNS settings at your registrar.

To reverse your changes (don’t forget to do so before you make the DNS changes at your registrar), remove the lines you added to the /etc/hosts file, save the file, and run lookupd -flushcache one more time.

Windows

On Windows, the Hosts file is located at different places depending on your version of Windows:

Windows 95/98/Me

c:\windows\hosts

Windows NT/2000/XP Pro

c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Windows XP Home

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

If you have difficulty finding the hosts file, you can go to Find on the Windows Start menu and type in hosts.

Open the hosts file with Notepad, and enter the following at the bottom of the file:

123.456.78.90             domain.com

123.456.78.90             www.domain.com

where 123.456.78.90 is the IP address sent in the Hosting Order Status message sent to you when your hosting account was created, and of course domain.com is your own domain name. The white space between the IP address and the domain is a tab.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Simply download the Plugins to your local computer, then upload them to your site.

• Akismet - by Matt Mullenweg
  Protects your blog against comment and trackback spam by comparing the incoming against the
• Podpress - by Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r)
  Everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting.
• Redirection - by John Godley
  Redirect visitors from an old URL to a new one. Very useful for bloggers who migrate their blogs to PressHarbor from another non-WordPress platform.
• Share This - by Alex King
  “Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.”
• SpamKarma 2 - by dr Dave
  “Ultimate Spam Killer for WordPress.”
• Subscribe To Comments - by Mark Jaquith
  “Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.”
• WP-Cache - by Ricardo Galli Granada
  High performance caching allows your blog to serve pages faster.

Our WordPress Auto-Update System will install the latest version of these Plugins whenever they are updated. For this reason, you should not customize any of the pre-installed Plugins as your changes would be erased when our Auto-Update System writes over your revised version of the theme with an updated version of the original theme.

If you would like to customize one of the pre-installed Plugins, you should first download a copy of it to your computer. Make your customizations locally, then re-upload the customized version of your Plugins to a new directory within the Plugins directory of your web server.