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One thing that seems to bother quite a few WordPress users who live out here on the fringes of the civilised world is the greeting in the headers of admin pages: for some reason, ‘Howdy, Paul Left’ seems out of place. Apparently, the greeting is justified because WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg is from Texas. It’s never bothered me too much, but it does seem to bother some users. Perhaps it’s tied up with the sense of annoyance that many users feel in relation to the dominance of English on the web. Certainly, educational users of WordPress (such as teachers incorporating blogging into their courses) might want to customise the software to include a greeting more culturally familiar to their students.

The trouble is, the greeting cannot be changed in the settings as it’s hard-coded into the WordPress source code. It used to be fairly easy to change this text by editing the code, but a couple of versions ago the File Editor was removed from WordPress, along with the ability to edit WordPress code from the admin page. As far as I know the only way to do this now is to edit the code using FTP. If you need to do this, you’ll need FTP access to the WordPress server. These steps work with Fetch on a Mac, but should apply pretty well to other platforms and FTP clients:

1. Using the FTP client, go to the folder ‘wp-admin’ and locate the file ‘admin-header.php’
2. To be safe, take a copy of this file by downloading it (‘get’) and saving to your hard disk.
3. Right-click on the file name and choose ‘Edit’. This should download the file and open it in a text-editor
4. Find the text ‘Howdy’ and replace it with the desired greeting. For example, here in New Zealand I changed the greeting to ‘Kia ora’. In WordPress 2.7.1 this should be in line 108.
5. Do not change any other text in the file, just that one word! If you make a mistake, use undo to put it back the way it was, and do not save it back to the server unless you are absolutely sure you have made the correct change.
6. Try reloading the admin page – hopefully you will see your new greeting. If not, and you’re not sure how to fix it, you will have to undo what you’ve done. This is where the backup of the file you downloaded in step 2 will be handy

By the way, there’s no easy way to include non-English characters using this method: while WordPress can display text such as Καλή μέρα in a post, it can’t easily be included in the source code. There are ways to include such characters but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

Disclaimer: this worked for me, but editing source code is risky and a mistake can render your site unusable. Please be careful – I accept no responsibility for anything going wrong!

Image: Brueghel’s Tower of Babel

Like many education bloggers, I tend to write less frequent posts but have a lot of drafts that I am working on. It often takes some time to fully develop the ideas in these posts so they are ready to publish. So managing my draft posts is important to me.

I also use WordPress in my professional development activities with teachers, helping them to use it as a tool for their own reflective practice as well as explore how they might use it on their own teaching. They too need to be able to manage drafts effectively and easily.

However, using the old WordPress dashboard interface (up to version 2.6) to access your drafts was a little clunky. And when working with teachers, I found the interface to be non-intuitive and a barrier to their effective use.

The new version puts a list of recent drafts right onto the dashboard page – this is a great improvement for anyone like me who has lots of draft posts on the go at once. And it will remove a barrier for teachers learning to use a WordPress blog as part of their own professional development or in their courses. It’s a simple change but a significant improvement.

A few other changes I’ve noted:

• Earlier versions had a problem with the dashboard ‘External links’ block – any changes to the configuration were not properly saved. I’m pleased to see this is now fixed.
• The Flash-based image uploader tool no longer works as expected on Mac running Firefox. When the image is uploaded, the ‘insert into post’ button does not work the first time round. The fix is to use the browser uploader tool, or insert a new image in two stages: ‘insert into post’ seems to work fine with images that have previously been uploaded.
• Because the dashboard screen layout is slightly different, older plugins that write text to admin screens need a little tweaking to display correctly. For example, I had to change my Scottish Proverbs plugin slightly – luckily, the version of the Hello Dolly plugin distributed with WordPress 2.7.1 provides a clear guide to exactly what needs to be changed!

All up, WordPress 2.7.1 is a ‘must-have’ release and incorporates a much more user-friendly dashboard interface. It’s an excellent example of how effective the open-source approach can be in developing great software tools.