It's widely agreed among users that the Strayhorn upgrade of WordPress was the best upgrade they ever did. The extensive user community of WordPress all gave input, and the Strayhorn upgrade not only does everything they asked for, but also does it all well. In addition, the dozens of plugins to expand the capabilities of your blog system give you one of the best and most complete blogs available today.

Did I mention that it's free and open-source?

Strayhorn puts years of blogging experience to work in its new systems. It is compliant with all standards, easy to learn and fast to install, and has a lean programming base that makes your work fast and efficient. If you're intimidated by even this, you can look for a web hosting partner offering a one-click install of WordPress, or register for a free account on http://WordPress.com.

A Guided Tour

If you're used to using the old WordPress interface, you'll find a lot of differences. The admin interface especially is changed from the old version. The dashboard gives you easy access to information you really need to see, like the last five posts you created and the last five comments made to your blogs overall. In addition, you'll be able to see your most-wanted statistics on posts, comments, and categories, and incoming links from Technorati.

In another section of the dashboard you'll find WordPress-specific data: the most recent posts and tons of useful links from WordPress Planet. Your most recent drafts are also listed here.

In the Write section, you have the choice between the traditional Write Post and the new Write Page. Write Post is precisely what you expect it to be. Write Page is a completely new feature, and one that is not shared by most blogging systems. With Write Page, you can easily create an about page, a contact page, a links page, and other nifty informational sections you want your readers to have access to. This is something that every blogging system should include!

The Manage section has all your editing and organization tools together in one convenient place, including comments that need moderating. The Links section also is precisely what you would expect to see here, including adding, managing, organizing, and importing tools.

The Presentation section is another great new tool that few blogging systems offer. You can either select a Theme or you can use the Theme Editor to modify files in any given theme. Themes in WordPress are templates that have been set up to create all the different pages you might need for your blog, including a 404 page, archives, comments, headers, indexes, regular pages, searches, etc. If you want other page types you can create them or modify the ones other people have created. And you can take complete templates and add your own graphics, colors, etc. to make your blog look as personal as you wish.

If you don't have enough options already, there are tons of plugins you can activate, edit, or download. Many plugins come with the Strayhorn release; others are available from the WordPress Plugin Repository. As of this writing, the Photo Gallery plugin is a little hard to use, but it's likely that will be corrected.

In the Options section, you can choose options for display like title, tagline, email address, date/time format, etc. as well as Writing options that include some neat tricks like blogging by email. You can also set your reading options for blog pages, syndication feeds, and other things.

Also in Options is the Discussion section, perhaps the most useful tool in this blogging system to combat content spam. Do you need to moderate comments? Or flag particular words to block automatically? Blacklist problem users? Do you want to just flat-out nuke content containing certain words entirely? You can do that. Permalinks can be set to write directly to your .htaccess file if you want them to, and links in general use the rel="nofollow" tag automatically. In addition, there are a dozen other options you'll find useful.

There are dozens of other nice features outside the administrative section of Strayhorn. Users report finding hardly any bugs, and the code is clean and tight. WordPress developers have gone out of their way to find out what the users really want for this upgrade, and it looks like they ended up with a world-class package that comes complete with a very active user community – the best of all worlds. And free. Nice.