wordpress

Emil Ong is the Chief Evangelist and a lead developer for Caucho Technology, the developers of the Quercus PHP to Java compiler. The idea, I guess, is to write in PHP, deploy in Java, which some people say is better supported by the “enterprise.”

Ong claims 26% performance improvement over Apache + mod_php + APC. That sounds great, I suppose, but it’s less than what Chris Lea suggests is possible if you simply replace Apache with Nginx.

“Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.” —Chris Lea.

Why? No forking. No loading of unnecessary components. Fast CGI. And to prove it’s not as complex as you might think, he’s installing it live. The session has eight minutes left, can he do it?

Yes, he did. The big concern is in managing permalinks without .htaccess, and it turns out it’s not so difficult. Does he have a cookbook for this? Darn, no time left for questions, I’ll have to ask later.

Aaron Brazell at WordCamp is talking about search and finability “not SEO.” Riffing on Ambient Findability, he asks:

• Can people find your blog?
• Can people find their way around your blog?
• Can people find your content and services despite your blog?

Remember:

• Your blog serves as a nexus for information about you.
• You serve as the nexus for trust and relevance.

Going Further? Make your social content outside your blog searchable, findable via your blog. Brazell conveniently recommends using Lijit, which does just that.

Elliott C. Back points to his use of object caching, WP-Cache, and MySQL query caching among the reasons why his site “is so much faster that yours.”

The news about BuddyPress has fully shifted my attention from single-blog WordPress installs to multi-user, multi-blog installs.

WordPress mu is my platform of choice, but I was quite fond of Lyceum when I first learned of it a while ago. The big perceived advantage of Lyceum is that it uses a unified table structure for all blogs, rather than creating a new set of tables for each blog as WPmu does. I’m not so sure that’s important now, and WPmu’s scheme now looks a lot easier to partition onto multiple database servers, should traffic ever scale there. Still Lyceum is an interesting project, and their name and logo are great.

I just realized OAuth support is slated for inclusion in WordPress 2.7. It’s not in trunk yet, but that’s no reason not to get up to speed. Scott Gilbertson says OAuth and OpenID are foundations to the open social web, giving apps like WordPress a “secure, centralized means of identifying yourself and a way to control who knows what about you.”

Chris Messina, who says we currently treat user credentials “like confetti,” is more than a little excited and is building a series of WordPress Plugins to take advantage of these formats. Stephane Daury is excited too.

Ozh’s tutorial explains the details, but the short story is that we’ll soon get WP_CONTENT_URL and WP_CONTENT_DIR constants. And this is more than just convenience, 2.6 allows site admins to put those directories anywhere they want, so the constants will be the only reliable way of finding that info.

Lorelle and Samir both point to a number of plugins to do surveys within WordPress, but neither of them say any of them are that good. And Samir is pretty disapointed: “at the end of it all, I never did find my ideal online survey tool.”

Survey Fly is the best recommendation from both of Lorelle and Samir, but it isn’t WP2.5 compatible and was las updated in summer 2006. It’s also limited to tracking only one survey at a time. Ugh.

Facebook and MySpace are trying to turn themselves into application platforms (how else will they monetize their audience?). Google is pushing OpenSocial to compete with it. But no matter what features they offer their users, they user still orbits the site.

Scot Hacker talks of BuddyPress changing the game, turning “social networks” from destination websites, to features you’ll find on every website. And the “social network” is the internet, with all those sites sharing information meaningfully.

Some might say this is little more than overgrown XFN, but Tris Hussey thinks Ning is on the ropes and Facebook should be worried.

At least the design shows all the right stuff.

I announced the bSuite 4 public beta not long ago, now I’ve just posted a new version to SVN that addresses some of the bugs and fleshes out some of the features. I have yet to update the bSuite page, but here’s a preview of what’s new or changed:

• Additional stats reports
• WP2.5-style tag input tools on the Page edit screen*
• WP2.5-style category selector on the Page edit screen*
• WP2.5-style excerpt input on the Page edit screen*
• For multi-author sites: ability to grant edit permissions by role for each page (with a configurable default)
• An “include” shortcode that makes it easy to show content from one post or page on another.

About the new shortcode, use it like this:

[inclu``de post_id=“1234” url=“a url to a post or page in your blog” field=“post_excerpt”]

One of post_id or url is required; field is optional and defaults to post_excerpt first, then to post_content if there is no excerpt.

*Why would you want to input tags, set categories, or add an excerpt to a Page? They help readers find and explore our content. What’s so wrong with that?

WordPress was released to the world five years ago today. Celebrate in SFO, Sydney, or with me at whatever bar I find myself at in New Hampshire tonight. DM me with any ideas.

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.

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 users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit posts. The posts are kept in ”draft“ until an admin can publish them (also configurable).”

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.

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 shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.