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WordPress 3.2 beta 1 has been released into the hands of beta testers. The big news is that we are finally on the way to stomping out IE 6, the bane of web developers existence. The millions of wordpress sites will soon prompt your lazy arse users to move to newer versions.

From WordPress.org:

Here’s some of what’s new:

• Performance improvements like you wouldn’t believe. What’s that mean? Things are faster!
• Distraction-free Writing. The visual editor’s full-screen composing experience has gotten a major overhaul, and is now available from HTML mode, too. More than ever, WordPress allows you to focus on what matters most — your content.
• Admin UI Refresh. The last major redesign of the WordPress admin was in 2008. This isn’t a major redesign, just a little facelift to keep us feeling young. WordPress turns 8 later this month, you know.
• New Default Theme. Introducing Twenty Eleven, based on the popular Duster theme. Rotating header images, post format support, and more.
• Browse Happy. WordPress is made to work with modern browsers. If you visit your Dashboard using an outdated web browser, we’ll let you know there’s a newer version available.
• Admin Bar. We’ve added more links to the admin bar to make it even more useful.

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A common question is asked is how do I embed google maps into your blog posts. There are two answers, the easy answer (which is here) and the hard answer which means you need to be a programmer.

Google has a Mapping API that provides an extremely comprehensive way of embedding and manipulating maps. The book I recommend for this is Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax: From Novice to Professional.

This is probably the most comprehensive but readable primer to developing using the Google Maps API version 2. Version 3 was released late last year and it importantly includes mobile support including getting location information for mobile applications. A new version of the book is due out soon that includes the new version 3.

Until recently, building interactive web-based mapping applications has been a cumbersome affair. This changed when Google released its powerful Maps API. Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax was written to help you take advantage of this technology in your own endeavorswhether you’re an enthusiast playing for fun or a professional building for profit. This book covers version 2 of the API, including Google’s new Geocoding service.

Authors Jeffrey Sambells, Cameron Turner, and Michael Purvis get rolling with examples that require hardly any code at all, but you’ll quickly become acquainted with many facets of the Maps API. They demonstrate powerful methods for simultaneously plotting large data sets, creating your own map overlays, and harvesting and geocoding sets of addresses. You’ll see how to set up alternative tile sets and where to access imagery to use for them. The authors even show you how to build your own geocoder from scratch, for those high-volume batch jobs.

The easy way is to use Google’s built in tools. If you look at the picture above you can see a link on the very right hand side.

So find the location that you want to map, then click on “Link”.

This automatically creates the code you need to embed into your post. Either a link or it uses an iframe to embed some HTML into your post. Remember, before you insert switch to HTML mode in the editor.

If you want to customize the layout click on “Customize and preview embedded Map” and modify the settings. Then cut and paste into your post.  That’s it.

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