WordPress 2.5 Out, MaisonBisson Upgraded

March 30, 2008 – 1:38 am

WordPress 2.5 is out (and the WordPress site got a facelift), and I’ve already upgraded MaisonBisson using SVN. The changes are exciting, and seem to reflect a tradition that’s developing in WordPress of delivering some really revolutionary features in the x.5 release.
The loss of file-based object caching was a bit of a problem, as my [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (2)



Tibet Open Letter and other innovative uses of WordPress

March 27, 2008 – 10:13 pm

All Things Digital is interesting. Parents would say My Baby Our Baby.com is a little more important. But Tibet Open Letter is as real as the violence.
Two things to note: all of them are based on WordPress, and those who discuss Tibet probably risk being listed by the Chinese government as a trouble maker.

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches | Comments (0)

Interesting WordPress Plugins

March 27, 2008 – 6:45 am

WP Contact Manager turns WordPress into a contact manager. It’s a combination of theme and plugins (including Custom Write Panel) that allows you to enter and manage contacts as blog posts (familiar, eh?). Use Members Only to secure access.
TDO Mini Forms ?allows you to add highly customisable forms to your website that allows non-registered [...]

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches, Technology | Comments (0)

WordPress 2.5 Offers Built-In Gravatar Support

March 6, 2008 – 11:48 am

Nobody doubted that full Gravatar support would make it into WordPress eventually. Weblog Tools Collection shows what they look like, how they’re managed, and how theme designers can implement them.

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches, Technology | Comments (0)

BuddyPress: The WordPress Of Social Networks?

March 5, 2008 – 1:41 pm

Andy Peatling, who developed a WordPress MU-based social network and then released the code as BuddyPress has just joined Automattic, where they seem to have big plans for it. I’d been predicting something like this since Automattic acquired Gravatar:
It?s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (2)



Movable Type To WordPress

March 3, 2008 – 11:35 am

Scot Hacker (yes, that’s really his name) posted a story about migrating China Digital Times (published by Berkeley School of Journalism) from Movable Type to WordPress:
We?ve launched with a lovely new design, reduced story publishing times from by orders of magnitude, been able to re-enable a bunch of features we?d previously had to disable for [...]

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches, Technology | Comments (0)

Changes To WordPress Object Caching In 2.5

February 7, 2008 – 6:20 am

Jacob Santos‘ FuncDoc notes:
The WordPress Object Cache changed in WordPress 2.5 and removed a lot of file support from the code. This means that the Object Cache in WordPress 2.5 is completely dependent on memory and will not be saved to disk for retrieval later. The constant WP_CACHE also changed its meaning.
I’ve just started using [...]

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches, Technology | Comments (5)

WordPress to_ping Query Optimization

January 23, 2008 – 12:34 pm

The WordPress team has taken up the issue of performance optimization pretty seriously, and I look forward to the fruits of their efforts, but I’m also casting a critical eye on my own code. Thanks to caching and a hugely optimized query architecture, Scriblio is now performing better than ever, and I’m now looking at [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

WordPress + Invalid URLs = Extra Database Queries

January 18, 2008 – 8:38 am

After reporting weirdness last week I finally sat down with a completely clean and virgin install of WordPress 2.3.2 and traced what happens when you make a permalink request for a non-existent URL.
Here are two sets of URLs to use as examples and context:

These are valid URLs:

http://site.org/archives/101
http://site.org/page-name

These are _not_ valid URLs:

http://site.org/archivezorz/101
http://site.org/favicon.ico

Valid URLs get parsed, the [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

WordPress Admin Redesign Progress

January 7, 2008 – 12:45 pm

Happy Cog’s Liz Danzico introduced it at WordCamp 2007 (her slides are online), but it’s been only recently that the fruits of the admin control panel re-thinking have started to appear in code. Though there’s much work yet to be done and it’s not uncontroversial, I think I like it.

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches, Technology | Comments (0)

WordPress 2.4 Performance, Timeline

December 29, 2007 – 12:07 pm

The good news is that performance is a big goal for WP 2.4, the bad news is that it’s been delayed to the end of January at the earliest.

By Casey | Posted in Blink | Comments (1)

Themes I Like

November 21, 2007 – 8:07 am

Matt has updated his site with a less blog-like front page and I just discovered Unsleepable, which is very bloggy, but seems like a good start for what I want to do next.

By Casey | Posted in Blink | Comments (1)

WordPress vs. Drupal

November 14, 2007 – 7:25 am

I’m a WordPress Partisan, so I agree with Mark Ghosh’s criticism of this Wordpress vs Drupal Report. Still, it reminds me that I should point out XXLmag, SLAM Online, and Ford among the very non-bloggy sites built on WordPress.

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches, Technology | Comments (1)

MaisonBisson And unAPI

October 29, 2007 – 4:48 am

Thanks to Mike Giarlo’s unAPI Server for WordPress. Now if only there were a library catalog built on WordPress, I could probably just drop it in.
unAPI, wordpress, plugin

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

Mullenweg on WordPress and Open Source

September 24, 2007 – 5:49 pm

I wish I’d seen this from WordPress maven Matt Mullenweg before I finished My LTR on open source software for libraries. Mullenweg is brushing off some of the mystique and praise the media has been giving him, and giving an honest sense of what makes open source software work:
the real story is more exciting than [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)