I just upgraded Janene’s and my blog to the latest version of WordPress using a slick bash script created by one of my buddies, Aaron Toponce. If you’ve never upgraded WordPress before, I’d recommend doing it by hand at least once so you understand the process (instructions are here), but if you’re looking for something to automagically upgrade your blog with minimal fuss, check out the script on Aaron’s blog: WordPress Upgrade Script. Worked like a charm for both the blogs I used it on, and I’ll definitely continue using it in the future. Good work, Aaron! 
As far as I could tell, WordPress doesn’t have any kind of global sitenotice feature like MediaWiki, but I needed one to promote my upcoming ride in the 2007 MS Bike Tour, so I wrote my own quick-and-dirty plugin.
I’m in the process of submitting this to wp-plugins.org so I can start some more serious and stable development, but if you’d like to try it out in the meantime, feel free to download the alpha version:
To use the plugin, you’ll need to add a new template tag to an appropriate place where you’d like the sitenotice to appear when it’s enabled (I have mine right at the end of my header.php template file). The new tag is <?php get_the_sitenotice(); ?>. The plugin adds a new admin panel called “Sitenotice” to the WordPress options menu, from which you can edit the sitenotice message and configure other features.
This is alpha software, so if you install it, realize you’re using it at your own risk. If you do try it out, let me know if you have any feature requests or find any bugs I should squash!
Fatal error: Call to undefined function do_textile() in /home/joeyday/public_html/wp-content/themes/syzygy/archive.php on line 47
