TOPIC: BLOG SOFTWARE
Setting the PHP version in .htaccess on Apache web servers
7th September 2014
The default PHP version on my outdoors, travel and photography website is 5.2.17 and that is getting on a bit now since it is no longer supported by the PHP project and has not been thus since 2011. One obvious impact was Piwik, which I use for web analytics and needs at least 5.3.2. Since WordPress 4.0 will not work without having 5.2.24 or later, that upgrade became implausible. Therefore, I contacted Webfusion's support team, and they showed me how to get to at least 5.3.3 and even as far as 5.5.9. The trick is the addition of a line of code to the .htaccess file (near the top was my choice) like one of the following:
PHP 5.3.x
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php
PHP 5.5.x
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php55 .php
When I got one of these in place, things started to look promising, but for a locked database due to my not watching how big it had got. Replacing it with two additional databases addressed the problem of losing write-access, though there was a little upheaval caused by this. Using PHP 5.5.9 meant that I spotted messages regarding the deprecation of the mysql_connect function, so that needed fixing too. Prefixing it with @ might have been a temporary fix while I sought a more permanent one. Thus, I opted for piggybacking off what WordPress uses; make use of MySQLi or PDO_MySQL are other options. Sorting the database issue meant that I saw the upgrade message for WordPress as well as a mix of plugins and themes, so all looked better, leaving me to be less concerned about losing security updates. Also, I am up to the latest version of Piwik too, and that's an even better way to be.
Tinkering with Textpattern
26th April 2011
While Textpattern 5 may be on the way, that isn't to imply that work on the 4.x branch is completely stopped, though it is less of a priority at the moment. After all, version 4.40 was slipped out not so long ago as a security release, a discovery that I made while giving a section of my outdoors website a spring refresh. During that activity, the TinyMCE plugin started to grate with its issuing of error messages in the form of dialogue boxes needing user input to get rid of them every time an article was opened or saved. Because of that nuisance, the guilty hak_tinymce plugin was ejected, with joh_admin_ckeditor replacing it and bringing CKEditor into use for editing my Textpattern articles. It is working well, even if the narrow editing area is causing the editor toolbars to take up too much vertical space, yet you can resize the editor to solve this, though it would be better if it could be made to remember those size settings.
Another find was atb_editarea, a plugin that colour codes (X)HTML, PHP and CSS by augmenting the standard text editing for pages and stylesheets in the Presentation part of the administration interface. If I had this at the start of my redesign, it would have made doing the needful that bit more user-friendly than the basic editing facilities that Textpattern offers by default. Of course, the tinkering never stops, so there's no such thing as finding something too late in the day for it to be useful.
Textpattern may not be getting the attention that some of its competitors are getting, but it isn't being neglected either; its users and developer community see to that. Saying that, it needs to get better at announcing new versions of the CMS so they don't slip by the likes of me, who isn't looking all the time. With a major change of version number involved, curiosity is aroused as to what is coming next. So far, Textpattern appears to be taking an evolutionary course, and there's a lot to be said for such an approach.
Changing to CKEditor from FCKEditor for WordPress Content Editing
25th April 2011
The post editor that I have been using on my WordPress-powered outdoors blog has not been TinyMCE but FCKEditor. My use of that editor has meant that WordPress' autosave and word counting features have not been available to me. As strange as it may sound to some, that is my choice. Even so, there have been times when I have missed the autosaving functionality and lost work.
Since FCKEditor has been replaced by CKEditor, there are plugins available for adding that editor to WordPress' administration interface. Recently, I replaced the old FCKEditor plugin with a newer CKEditor one, which has gained me post or page autosaving. Though the more cosmetic word counting feature is not active until a draft is manually saved, I can live with that.
Other than that, the interface remains familiar with all (X)HTML tags shown in the source code view without any being hidden away from view like on WordPress' implementation of TinyMCE. That isn't to see that WordPress is doing something wrong, only that there are alternative ways of doing things, that are equally valid. After all, why would there be choices if there only ever was one right way to do anything?
Like any WordPress plugins, those replacing the default content editor on WordPress can be vulnerable to changes in the publishing platform, and there is one of those in the pipeline for 3.2: a minimalist post/page editor that is billed as being non-distracting. That planned new feature is drawing inspiration from the likes of QuietWrite, where you can write content and transfer it over to WordPress or leave it where it was written.
Even with substantial changes like this, my experience never has been that design decisions made for new WordPress releases have restricted to any great extent how I use the thing. That's not to say that my usage hasn't changed over time, yet I have felt that any decisions were mine to make and not all made for me. In that light, I can foresee CKEditor continuing to work on WordPress 3.2 along with some testing ahead of time to be sure that is the case.
Turning off the admin bar in WordPress 3.1
25th October 2010
Work on WordPress 3.1 is in full swing at the moment, though I initially thought that they were taking a little break after 3.0. From what I can see, many refinements are being made to the multi-blog functionality and behind-the-scenes work is ongoing on the administration screens too.
Another under-the-bonnet change has been to make WordPress less tied to MySQL, since the possibility of dropping in support for an alternative such as PostgreSQL is now a reality even if it isn't part of the default package. For now, it looks as if this will be plugin territory rather than default multi-database support, though that may become a sensible development in the light of Oracle's acquisition of MySQL and its sabre-rattling regarding Java patents. So far, the change to WordPress has affected my use of its database engine to power an offline version of my online photo gallery, but a quick spot of code editing sorted that issue.
One more obvious alteration will be the addition of a WordPress.com style administration bar to the top of all content and administration screens for a user who is logged into the system. Though it will be turned on by default, there will be the option of turning it off for those among who prefer things that way. All that will be needed for this is to add the following line near the top of wp-config.php:
define( "WP_SHOW_ADMIN_BAR", false);
The chance to see new additions like those above and be ready for is my main reason for following WordPress development. It's best to be ready instead of being surprised, though it has to be said that the blogging or CMS platform is a very polished one these days.
Removing a column from a MySQL data table
19th April 2010
My trying out WordPress 3.0 in advance of its final release has brought me errors on the management page for website links. After a spot of poking around the TRAC, I found that the bug already has been reported and that the cause is an extraneous column in the *_links table called link_category. The change in taxonomy handling over the years seems to have made it redundant, so I removed the said column from the database using a command like the following from both the MySQL command line and MySQL Query Browser:
alter table database.wp_links drop link_category;
That seems to have made those errors go away, and I hope that their upgrade code takes care of this before WordPress 3.0 is let loose of the general blogging public. Taking out the coding brittleness would do too.
Easier to print?
20th February 2010
One matter that really came to light was how well or not the pages on here and on my hill walking and photography website came out on the printed page. After spotting a WordPress Codex article and with an eye on improving things, I have made a distinction between screen and print stylesheets. The code in the XHTML looks like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style_print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />
The media attribute seems to be respected by the browsers that I have been using for testing (latest versions of Firefox, MSIE and Opera) so it then was a matter of using CSS to control what was shown and how it was displayed. Extraneous items like sidebars were excluded from the printed page in favour of the real content that visitors would be wanting anyway, and everything else was made as monochrome as possible, with images being the only things to escape. After all, people don't want to be wasting paper and ink in these cash strained times, and there's no need to have any more colour than necessary either. Then, there's the distraction caused by non-functioning hyperlinks that has inspired the sharing of some wisdom on A List Apart. Returning to my implementation, please let me know in the comments what you think of what I have done on here and if there remains any room for improvement.
Another look at Drupal for hosting a standalone website
20th January 2010
Early in the first year of this blog, I got to investigate the use of Drupal for creating an article-based subsite. In the end, the complexities of its HTML and CSS thwarted my attempts to harmonise the appearance of web pages with other parts of the same site, and I discontinued my efforts. In the end, it was Textpattern that suited my needs, and I have stuck with that for the aforementioned subsite.
However, I recently spotted someone very obviously using Drupal in its out of the box state for a sort of blog (there is even an extension for importing WXR files containing content from a WordPress blog); they even hadn't removed the Drupal logo. With my interest rekindled, I took another look for the sake of seeing where things have gone in the last few years. Well, first impressions are that it now looks more like a blogging tool, with greater menu control and the facility to define custom content types.
There are plenty of nice themes around too, though that highlights an idiosyncrasy in the sense that content editing is not fully integrated into the administration area where I'd expect it to be. The consequence of this situation is that pages, posts (or story as the content type is called) or any content types that you have defined yourself are created and edited with the front page theme controlling the appearance of the user interface.
It is made even more striking when you use a different theme for the administration screens. That oddity aside, there is a lot to recommend Drupal, even if I'd try setting up a standalone site with it rather than attempting to shoehorn it as a part of an existing one like what I was trying when I last looked.
Going mobile
20th October 2009
Now that the mobile web is upon us, I have been wondering about making my various web presences more friendly for users of that platform, and my interest has been piqued especially by the recent addition of such capability to WordPress.com. With that in mind, I grabbed the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin and set it to work, both on this blog and my outdoors one. Well, the results certainly seem to gain a seal of approval from mobiReady so that's promising. While it comes with a version of the Carrington Mobile theme, you need to pop that into the themes directory on your web server yourself, as WordPress' plugin installation routines won't do that for you. It could be interesting to see how things go from here, and the idea of creating my own theme while using the plugin for redirection honours sounds like a way forward; I have found the place where I can make any changes as needed. Homemade variants of the methodology may find a use with my photo gallery and Textpattern sub-sites.
Sometimes, things do get missed...
18th September 2009
Being a user of Textpattern, I should have a vested interested in any developments in that venerable web platform. However, the latest release came out at the end of August unbeknownst to me and that's with an entry on the Dev Blog. Since those blog entries come irregularly, that might have been how I missed it, especially when there were other things going on in my life like the installation of new windows in my house and weekends spent in Scotland and Ireland.
Still, the whole release was more low-key than, say, a new version of WordPress where many would be shouting how important the upgrade would be and with messages turning up on blog administration screens too. There may be good reason for this, given the recent problems experienced by those who fail to keep up with progress. Of course, WordPress is a major target for unwanted attention, so it's best to keep your wits about you. Though the quieter nature of the Textpattern project might be an asset when it comes to warding off miscreants, its greater compatibility with more technically minded folk may help security too. While saying all of that may be pure speculation, you only have to look at the world of operating systems to see how the idea came into my mind.
A later posting on the Textpattern blog tells you about the new goodies available in release 4.2.0, yet here's a short selection to whet your appetite: themes for the administration area, multiple sites and new tags. Upgrading proved painless, though I did try it out on an offline version of the microsite where I use Textpattern before making a move on its online counterpart. Even if all went smoothly, it's always best to look before you leap, or a site rebuild might be in order and no one needs that.
A self-hosted online photo album option
16th July 2009
When I was perusing a recent copy of Linux Format, I encountered a feature describing a self-hosted alternative to the likes of Flickr: Gallery. From my quick look, it looks fully featured, offering themes and even shopping cart facilities for those who want to sell their wares. The screenshots on the open-source project's website look promising but, for a fuller appraisal, I would need to spend some time trying to bend it to my will. Before anyone mentions it, I am aware that WordPress can be used for photoblogging, but this tool seems to take things a bit further. It's the sort of thing about which I might have wondered, given the pervasiveness of content management systems these days. My own custom-built photo gallery is devoid of a slick back end, hence why Gallery caught my eye, but I'll continue with it and may even get to adding the needful myself.