Wordpress wins the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. Here’s an intro from the committee along with other two winners which you might want to know:
We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

While WordPress occupied the top spot in the Overall Award, the other two extremely popular finalists MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position. After Pixie and Pligg sharing a similar result for the Most Promising CMS category, this is the second time the combined opinion of judges and the public was evenly divided for two CMSes, awarding each of them a first runner up spot.

Here’s the distribution of the prize fund for this category:

WordPress: $4,000

MODx: $2,000

SilverStripe: $2,000

Wordpress version 2.8.5 has been released. Here are the reasons why you should upgrade

* A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
* Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
* Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
* Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

Update 17 June 2009: I’ve just upgraded this blog from wordpress version 2.7 into wp 2.8. The load is faster and smoother. The widget interface is exactly like the one in wordpress.com (see the screenshot here). Drag and drop is back. Widget saving is also simpler, you don’t need to scroll down to save a widget setting. Once you done setting a particular widget, it’s saved automatically.

It’s faster because it put the javascript call in the footer meaning the server load any javascript AFTER everything else (html, etc). If you haven’t upgraded into 2.8, you might need to do it now especially if you have slow connection experience.

Don’t worry about plugins compatibility. As far as I am concerned, all plugins I used since wordpress 2.5  was compatible with wp 2.7 and wp 2.8.

***

Wordpress 2.8 is Out of Beta and is released for everyone.

Download here for free.

Wordpress 2.8 beta 2 now moves to Release Candidate 1 meaning in  it will be out of beta soon.

This morning, when I checked this blog I am a bit surprised to know that all categories and tags are not shown. It’s disappeared. Important to note that I’ve not done anything (upgrading or something like that) to this blog during this past 12 hours. I then contact my hosting provider concerning this thing assuming that the problem might come from the server.

While waiting for the answer from my hosting, I search about it in wordpress forum. It turns out that the problem has taken place many times before. Take a look at the following complains:

From Carpathia
…there was no upgrade done and am using v2.5.

Earlier this week “No categories.” appeared where the any actual category links had been before.

When I go to manage > categories, no categories are displayed.

When I go to Manage->Posts, all Posts are marked as “Uncategorized”. When I do click on any given Post the Categories panel does properly indicate the categories that it belongs to.

I thought it was fixed after deactivating all plugins and the categories reappeared. As of yesterday, I am having the same problem again.

From Marvicbiz:

I’m experiencing the same problem with our Dutch flooring website – it’s a new installation (WP 2.6.2) and I haven’t run an upgrade.

One the web pages (right sidebar), the categories show “No Categories” while the tags are listed in the tag cloud (in the footer) but if you click on it, it says there are no posts.

When I log into admin, there are no tags or categories, not even on the posts themselves.

The Cause and Solution (?)
Miladinoski in this thread says it’s something to do with phpMyAdmin of a particular hosting is down. If it’s correct, the problem is with the hosting provider:

…I have the same problem with disappearing categories of Wordpress. This is connected to phpMyAdmin falling down and not working, and that has happened 6 times for the ~3 weeks I’m hosted here, ‘cmmon guys what’s so wrong with your servers, phpmyadmin is almost 30% of the time not working and Wordpress’s plugins are connected to the mySQL database and when it’s not working, they’re not working properly either (I can’t upload content, I can’t auto-upgrade plugins, some plugins don’t work, categories dissappear if they have been edited during the downtime of phpmyadmin and they come back after it’s fixed). At me, phpMyAdmin is down from yesterday, I submitted a ticket but it still isn’t resolved and I am very nerved because of that, I want my site to work at least 90% of the time as it should, I’m facing problems a lot of time I have been here, and I don’t know why there are so much problems which disappear and reappear the next day or 2 days after they have been fixed.

Anyone has the better answer?

I used this plugin in this blog (http://fatihsyuhud.com/archives/).

Plugins name: SRG Clean Archives
Downloads:

(a) Current version: 4.3 Supports  (WordPress version 2.5.x and 2.6.x only).

• Download Clean Archives 4.3

(b) Version: 4.2 (Supports WordPress versions 2.1.x thru 2.3).

• Download Clean Archives 4.2

How to Install:

1. After unzip, put it in plugins directory –/wp-content/plugins/put-here
2. Creating Archive Page
(i) Create a page in wordpress. In my case, I create page named “Archives”.
(ii) In the Page Content section click “HTML” (NOT Visual) first and add the following code:
<!–srg_clean_archives–>
3.Publish the Page. Done.

Further reading and more alternate position see here.

Name of Plugins: WP Super Cache
Version: 0.8.8
Compatibility: Wordpress 2.7 and below
Author: Donncha O Caoimh
Download: Download the plugins here for free (zip file)
How to install: See installation guide here for details.

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

However, because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment, the plugin will only serve static html files to:

1. Users who are not logged in.
2. Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
3. Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

The good news is that probably more than 99% of your visitors don’t do any of the above! Those users who don’t see the static files will still benefit because they will see regular WP-Cache cached files and your server won’t be as busy as before. This plugin should help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking site.

Download here.