This guest post was written by Rikard Kjellberg, a Silicon Valley blogger who works on social syndication solutions for publishers. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

You may have noticed that Facebook social plugins are everywhere these days with the popular ”Like” button, primarily because of its ease of use and how it integrates with the social graph.  This is because the button represents a one-time sharing event vs. establishing a lasting connection with your readers.  Now imagine instead how you could get ongoing updates on topics that interest you!

A recent addition to the WordPress plugin directory does just that! Facebook Like for Tags transforms the Like button into a personalized user connection for ongoing updates and sharing based on tags or categories.

For example, say you have a travel blog. One day you write about southern France. In your post you assign categories “Europe” and “France” to the post.  Some of your readers really enjoy the article and share it in Facebook by clicking on the Like button. Some time later, you again write about France. Those readers who had “Liked” the previous article will now get an update automatically in their Facebook News Feed!

Since the automatic update is based on user interest, it will be relevant to the user and thereby more likely to grab attention. The result is more revisits to your site and more reach into Facebook due to additional sharing. Over time you will commonly see in excess of 25% more page views.

A more detailed description of the plugin and installation can be found here.  Grab Facebook Like for Tags today and transform the Like button into a trusted recommendations engine!

Disclosure: I am co-founder of IngBoo, the provider of this WordPress plugin and the cloud-based change-detect-notification service that powers the function.

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After nearly 11 million downloads of WordPress 3.0 in just 42 days, we’re releasing WordPress 3.0.1. The requisite haiku:

Three dot oh dot one
Bug fixes to make you smile
Update your WordPress

This maintenance release addresses about 50 minor issues. The testing many of you contributed prior to the release of 3.0 helped make it one of the best and most stable releases we’ve had.

Download 3.0.1 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

Note: If you downloaded 3.0.1 in the first 20 minutes of release (before 2200 UTC), you’ll want to reinstall it, which you can do right from your Updates screen. Our bad.

Our approach with WordPress has always been to make it run on common server configurations. We want users to have flexibility when choosing a host for their precious content. Because of this strategy, WordPress runs pretty much anywhere. Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!

First up, the announcement that developers really care about. WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4.

For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.

The numbers are now, finally, strongly in favor of this move. Only around 11 percent of WordPress installs are running on a PHP version below 5.2. Many of them are on hosts who support PHP 5.2 — users merely need to change a setting in their hosting control panel to activate it. We believe that percentage will only go down over the rest of the year as hosting providers realize that to support the newest versions of WordPress (or Drupal, or Joomla), they’re going to have to pull the trigger.

In less exciting news, we are also going to be dropping support for MySQL 4 after WordPress 3.1. Fewer than 6 percent of WordPress users are running MySQL 4. The new required MySQL version for WordPress 3.2 will be 5.0.15.

WordPress users will not be able to upgrade to WordPress 3.2 if their hosting environment does not meet these requirements (the built-in updater will prevent it). In order to determine which versions your host provides, we’ve created the Health Check plugin. You can download it manually, or use this handy plugin installation tool I whipped up. Right now, Health Check will only tell you if you’re ready for WordPress 3.2. In a future release it will provide all sorts of useful information about your server and your WordPress install, so hang on to it!

In summary: WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4 and MySQL 4. WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, will require PHP 5.2 or higher, and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher. Install the Health Check plugin to see if you’re ready!