I’ve finally attempted to upgrade WordPress to 2.7.1 today, and I have to say, it was both very easy and very hard at the same time; easy in that the upgrade was very simple and straightforward…once I’d got everything uploaded (this was the hard part, but I’m not blaming it on WordPress :P). The new Dashboard really is quite cool, although I would probably prefer the old 2.6.2 Dashboard over this one, simply because I’ve used it longer, but I’m sure I’ll get used to 2.7 in time. I only had to change a few small things in wp-includes to get my theme to work properly again (it did already, though I had to add the WLM status and Random Engrish functions again, as well as change some “hard-coded” tags.

ryxdp

My first official skin for the new Messenger version has now been released! You can check it out here, but first, you might want to know a few things:

- Some images and colours cannot be edited (these colours appear to be hardcoded, and the images have a variable size so cannot be replaced easily)
- When Scenes are removed, colourising close to or on greyscale (black, white, etc) may result in red portions of some images (mostly just the “Scene” image, though). This is an issue with Messenger’s colourisation engine, and should be fixed with in a coming version of Messenger Plus! Live.
- Advertisements have been completely removed. This, to me, also means the Dynamic Content in the Emoticons, Winks etc. popup menus.
- The Min/Max/Close buttons on Vista have been replaced with the default XP buttons.

Enjoy!

ryxdp

Yep, a new version of WLMod (WLMod Wave3, codenamed Ceduna) is in the works, coming along very well. This update for WLM9 will sport all the usual simplifying elements — but now with some extra bits and pieces for the new Messenger.

WLMod was originally an attempt at a proof of concept to show that Messenger’s layout could be changed to a moderate extent without replacing or adding images. In Messenger 2009 however, it has become pretty much impossible to do this, so I’ve decided to use images in Ceduna anyway.

Ceduna should be released around the end of June, perhaps earlier if I get the time.

ryxdp