wordpress

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 load reasons, and added new features that were never possible before. The team of authors and editors is in heaven, and I’m considering bringing the site back onto the main J-School server. It’s been a good week.

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.

Dan’s instructable for custom rewrite rules in WordPress is better than the docs in the codex.

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.

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.

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.

Scriblio is based on WordPress, an open source content management system, and the community that uses, supports, and builds it is what makes it great. WordCamp started last year, when the community was about 750,000, and it’s even more important now that it’s grown to nearly two million.

The first day of the schedule focuses on how to better use the software, and included a great session by Lorelle VanFossen. Tomorrow is more technical, with discussions about performance, usability, and development.

What’s it all mean to Scriblio? Part of the Scriblio design philosophy is to make it easy to take advantage of advances in technology and practice that are serving all internet users, not just library users. The community has ramped up the WordPress development and release schedule, by building on top of that we get to spend our time figuring how to use the technology to serve our patrons without having to build a library-specific version of it.

[tags]WordCamp, WordCamp 2007, WordPress[/tags]

WordPress 2.2 is out and available for download now!

I’m excited because this version includes widgets (by default), some XML-RPC hooks to edit pages (so you don’t need my hacks), a switch to jQuery from Scriptaculous (Matty got me excited about this), full Atom support (enough of the different versions of RSS!), and the ability to set your MySQL character encoding (go UTF-8!).

If that isn’t enough, 2.3 is planned for release in September.

The question:

What’s a good user-friendly Macintosh web development program? A friend called. She’s thinking of buying Dreamweaver, but is afraid it will be overkill. She found Frontpage to be easy and needs something similar.

My answer:

If the intent is to design individual pages on an unknown number of sites, then I don’t have a recommendation.

If the intent is to build a site (or any number of sites), then I’d suggest looking at WordPress. It’s an open source CMS, and there’s a hosted version that makes it easy to try out at WordPress.com.

What I didn’t say, well, it was buried in my answer, was that I see a big difference between designing a page and building a site. The tools are very different.

Ecto is finally available in Intel optimized form, but WP 2.1‘s XMLRPC breaks it. Cliffy, of all people, tells us how to fix it.

Now, when is Ecto 3 coming out?

Aside: this blog post explains how to hack up the XMLRPC to extract the tags Ecto is sending. This was interesting to me a long time ago, but bsuite handles tags entirely in the post content.

Ryan Boren wrote about using memcached with WordPress almost a year ago:

Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system. WordPress 2.0 can make use of memcached by dropping in a special backend for the WP object cache. The memcached backend replaces the default backend and directs all cache requests to one or more memcached daemons. You must have a memcached daemon running somewhere for this to work. Unless you’re managing the server on which your blog is running, you probably can’t run a memcached daemon, making this backend useless to you. The memcached backend is targeted at ISPs and those running WPMU. If you are using WPMU and distributing DB requests across multiple servers, memcached will come in very handy. Using memcached for a single blog isn’t really worth it. In my tests, it was sometimes slower than using the default object cache backend.

The plugin is here, a bug-fix note is here.

I’ve been following WP2.1 development, but Aaron Brazell’s post in the development blog wrapped up a lot of questions all at once.

The short story is that 2.1 is going to bring some really good changes that will allow more flexibility and better optimization of WPopac. Of the four changes Brazell names, the last two, the addition of the post_type column and a change in usage of the post_status column, are where the money is.

I’m awaiting the final release of 2.1 before building the necessary changes into WPopac, but the benefits will be worth it.