WordPress 2.6 added post revisions as a new feature that is turned on by default. In an earlier post, I described how you could control this by editing wp-config.php and there are a number of plugins that purport to provide the same level of control through the administration screens. Even so, I decided to look at things from the housekeeping side of things and create my own plugin for clearing the database of revisions at one swoop. Currently, it takes out all revisions but I am thinking of adding the facility for selecting which revision to keep and which to delete. It goes without saying that you should back up your database first in case anything might go wrong.

Download Remove Revisions 1.0

This may seem esoteric for some but I like to be in control of the technology that I use. So, when Automattic included post revision retention to WordPress 2.6, I had my reservations about how much it would clutter my database with things that I didn’t need. Thankfully, there is a way to control the feature but you won’t find the option in the administration screens (they seem to view this as an advanced setting and so don’t want to be adding clutter to the interface for the sake of something that only a few might ever use); you have to edit wp-config.php yourself to add it. Here are the lines that can be added and the effects that they have:

Code: define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’,'0′);

Effect: turns off post revision retention

Code: define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’,'-1′);

Effect: turns it on (the default setting)

Code: define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’,'2′);

Effect: only retains two previous versions of a post (the number can be whatever you want so long as it’s an integer with a value more than zero).

Update (2008-07-23): There is now a plugin from Dion Hulse that does the above for you and more.

When making a start in the world of blogging, there are so many things to consider that you almost need a trial run first to learn the lingo. In fact, getting up to speed by using a service like that offered by Blogger or WordPress.com seems a very sensible starting point. Even so, the business is like building a house in that you only really what you are knowing after you have done the deed and made all the mistakes. That is particularly true when you go down the self-administered blog route. For starters, it’s so easy to pick the wrong domain name or hosting provider. Selecting your blogging software is the next step but that may not be so tricky; WordPress does a reasonable job and there’s always Movable Type, Expression Engine, Drupal (yes, really) or Habari.

That mention of blogging software brings me to something that I encountered recently: commenting functionality. I am coming around to the idea that this is probably something that needs to be considered up front because of the nature of blogging. After all, anyone that reads The Blog Herald regularly should be familiar with the idea of blogging conversations and that means that the technology to make it happen should be easy for visitors to use and easy for bloggers to administer. However, the two can collide. For one thing, there are a myriad of choices available to the blogger and the blight of comment spam is ever pervasive and growing.

When it comes to comment spam, it is best to realise that there are two sources of responses to a blog post: visitor comments or trackbacks (pingbacks?) from other blogs. I am of the opinion that the latter is probably the channel where most of the detritus travels and various anti-spam solutionss are on offer to curb its spread. Names from the WordPress world like Akismet, Spam Karma, Simple Trackback Validation and Bad Behaviour come to mind. The former can also be used, particularly when the unscrupulous make use of low cost labour in low cost countries, and that’s when the thorny questions of user registration and CAPTCHA’s arise. There is something to be said for not going to extremes with these and just stick with less onerous rules and filtering on the server side.

I must admit to having staggering into forcing visitors to register prior to adding a comment and then making them log in thereafter. I think that it’s for security reasons but WordPress creates a password and then sends it to the person who is registering rather than displaying on a web page. That can create another problem: what happens if the email fails to arrive? In the last week, this has happened with a visitor to my hillwalking blog and there could be a number of reasons for the non-arrival of the relevant email. One is ironic: being an automated email, it is getting stuck in the spam filters of the recipient’s mailbox and so never gets to them. It could also be a bug with WordPress itself (I have raised a ticket and am awaiting what Automattic might have to say to it) or a consequence of some setting made by a hosting provider. All of that makes it hard to track down the cause of the issue but it kicks off other thoughts as to its resolution. One is to remove the needed for registration and logging in in the first place but there are third party services that may help too. The former has turned out to be the case for this blog and it seems to be performing well enough so it is an acceptable option.

When it comes to using third party comment handling systems, what needs to be considered is how well they work with your blog. For instance, I gave Disqus a quick whirl and soon realised that I needed to update the themes for my WordPress blogs if I was to use it on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, it worked fine but I was left wondering if it would have been better to have brought it in when I started a blog rather than part way through and with comments made using the existing WordPress functionality. There’s also Intense Debate and I am almost certain that there are more like it but I’ll be sticking with what WordPress offers for now. The theme for my hillwalking blog has been modified to allow prospective commenters to get in touch with me if they are having problems. That’s is only an interim approach while I consider what the way forward will be.

Now that WordPress 2.6 is out, it is time to introduce a new version of Countrytones to the public. A few CSS tweaks have been needed to the original version after the changes that have been made to the administration interface for 2.6. Those screens still look largely the same with this release as they did before but for the styling of things like the bubble that alerts you to the availability of plugin upgrades, among other things.

Download Countrytones 1.0.1

There was a time when I tested out a new WordPress release when it made its appearance but I now now keep tabs on development versions too. It helps me to be ready in ample time and avoid any ugly stuff appearing on either here or my hillwalking blog. On the surface, the changes made don’t seem so dramatic after the revamp of the administration interface that came with 2.5. Under the bonnet, a lot of bugs have been fixed and many behind the scenes features have been included for the first time. I’ll leave it for you to go to Planet WordPress or check out the relevant entry on the WordPress Development blog. You’ll find a Flash video tour of the latest version from Automattic below.

Of course, WordPress development doesn’t stop here and there are some considerable changes to the administration interface to come at some point if they ever make out into the mainstream from the crazyhorse branch. I’ll be continuing to keep an eye on how things go from here so as to be ready for whatever might be in the offing. For now, enjoy 2.6 but it’ll interesting to see where it all goes from here.

While everyone is making good use of WordPress 2.5.x, development continues apace for future releases of the popular blogging platform and there are some goodies coming through on the functionality front. Google Gears are being brought into play for speeding up the administration dashboard; this started out being more prominent before being made more unobtrusive. The other big change has been an overhaul of the theme gallery and, if the theme is compatible, an overview facility has been added too. So WordPress is being tweaked and improved in the background to make 2.6 an interesting release.

Over the course of it’s short history, this blog has had four different themes, the latest of which being my own customised variant of Dezzain’s Zoxengen. It’s predecessor’s have included Andreas04, Andreas09 and Prosumer. I have tinkered with all of these to varying degrees but each has offered me a certain something before I set about my tweaks. Zoxengen is no different and its clean lines and Web 2.0 feel attracted my attention. Other little features like seeing related posts listing on a post’s comments page or listing the tags associated with a post under its title line are, I hope, useful little extras. Correcting English (I may be digging a hole for myself here) and removing advertising slots (for me, this blogging business is a hobby so you’ll find no ads on any of my blogs) both seem to be a necessary tasks when implementing themes these times but the really major change was to make the design more flexible when it comes to different screen sizes, something that I hope to have achieved by allowing it to fill more of the browser window. There may be more changes, hopefully small, but I hope that you find the result as pleasing on the eye as I do.

Update: The blog’s current theme came with a lot of text that was written in poor English. While I should have got rid of all of it from the theme by now, there may be some still lurking here somewhere. If I find any more, it’ll get sorted. If something has escaped my notice for whatever reason, please let me know.

The final release of WordPress 2.5 isn’t out yet but that hasn’t stopped me playing around with it and spotting a bug or two. Along the way, I have taken the chance to create a plugin that takes the old Earthtones palate into the new world. To do this, I have taken the WordPress Classic colours stylesheet along with some template code from planetOzh and tweaked it accordingly. I may not have got to every possible nook and cranny for colouration but I hope to have covered most of them. You may even find it useful yourself.

See a Screenshot

Download Countrytones

If the milestone date was to be believed, WordPress 2.5 was due yesterday. However, it has yet to show and a quick look on WordPress Trac reveals why: loads of outstanding tickets relating to bugs. In fact, there seem to be more tickets associated with this than other releases. I suppose that we can expect the new release when we see it then. Interestingly, the administration screen theming references have been removed from the pre-release version so that’s a functionality for a future release and it’s not hard to see why. Otherwise, the style of the screens in the latest Subversion revision looks a bit smarter and my blog themes are not getting broken. For my online blogs, I’ll be sticking with 2.3.3 for now.

Movable Type was the leading blogging platform before Six Apart disappointed their users with their licensing and WordPress came into being. Now that WordPress would seem to be king of the hill, it’s tempting to conclude that there’s nothing else out there for those wanting a self-hosted blog. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

These days, Movable Type is available as an open source entity and I have been giving it a quick whirl. Importing from a WordPress export file is very swish and a quick spot of tinkering gets you a running in no time. Getting the thing set up can be a little confusing because the processing is done by CGI scripts and they need to live in your website’s cgi-bin directory while the actual blog is instantiated in another location. Aside from that complexity, things are not that offputting and the style of the administration and content management dashboard could show WordPress a thing or two. It’s partitioning of trackbacks from comments is another useful feature in this world pervaded by comment spam.

Habari is another option that I have encountered and it seems like early days for this one. The first impression that struck me was its minimalist feel but it will do most of what you ask of it when it comes to blogging. Nevertheless, importing and exporting is one area that needs more development and its handling of themes is a matter that warrants more exploration on my part. In summary, it seems to offer most of your needs, even if there is nothing to make it stand out from the crowd at this time.

I encountered another alternative platform in the pages of PC Plus called Expression Engine. It is commercial software but there is a free cut down version available without some of the modules. There is a bit more to the offering than blogging but you have to buy it to get features like wikis, forums and the like. As it happens, the blogging capability in the free version is creditable and it seems that you can manage multiple blogs through the same interface, a feature that has potential when it comes to using the software as a kind of CMS. It cannot directly import from WordPress but a Movable Type export file is accepted without a bother. With regards to changing the look and feel of the blog, I found that editing the index and stylesheet files through the administration interface produced good results quite easily and quickly. Maybe creating a new theme might be a worthwhile project to see how one can make a blog’s appearance fall into line with the other parts of a website. After all, Ellis Labs claim that the software should work the way that you do.

I only have done a quick spot of fiddling with any of the above but there is potential for further investigations to see what else they have to offer. I am sure that there are other alternatives and the CMS Drupal comes to mind for its having a blogging module, even if I didn’t find the main CMS functionality to be sufficiently flexible for my needs when I last tried it (a new version made it appearance recently); overly complex CSS was one bugbear for me. Even with all the possibilities, I won’t be spending too much of my time exploring this area. Suffice it to say, it’s not a completely WordPress world…