TOPIC: CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
26th September 2007
Primarily because of the WordPress plugins that I use, a few inconsistencies have leaped out of the woodwork that needed to be fixed. Here are the issues that I encountered:
Database errors appearing in web pages
This was a momentary discovery along the upgrade trail, entirely caused by the way in which I was doing things. As usual, I went and copied over the WordPress 2.3 files to my web server, so I saw these errors before I ran the upgrade script. Then, they were banished, confirming that WordPress 2.3 code was trying to access a WordPress 2.2 type database; 2.3 has made some database changes to incorporate tagging.
Dashboard Editor no longer fully functional
The move to JQuery meant that some of the things for which it was looking had changed. They also changed the incoming links provider from Technorati to Google, now that the former is having a tougher time of it. It took a while to track down why I was unable to remove components from the front page of my dashboard as before, but a quick comparison of 2.3 code with its 2.2.3 forbear revealed all. I can make a copy of the updated code available for those who need it.
WordPress Admin Themer
The plugin works as before and does its job so well that you end up applying an old stylesheet (in the blog's theme folder) to the latest release. It only took a spot of tweaking to put everything in order.
I am not complaining about any of these, partly because they were easy to resolve and, in any event, I don't mind a spot of code cutting. However, I can foresee some users being put out by them, hence my sharing my experiences.
Update: Dashboard Editor has since been updated by the author. Even so, I will stick with my own version of the plugin.
21st September 2007
The final release of the next version of WordPress is due out on Monday and because there are sure to be security fixes included, I have been giving the release candidate a go on my offline blogs. Since 2.3 is another major release, I have been doing some preparation. In fact, the WordPress project has a blog entry dedicated to such things for this release. Thankfully, I think that my hillwalking blog should emerge unscathed by this upgrade; I still need to have a go with an offline version of this blog.
The special feature in the new release is tagging, and it is good to see that it has had no impact on legacy set-ups. Though I had the same reservations about 2.2 with its inclusion of sidebar widgets, the backward compatibility was enough to see me through without any hiccups. Tagging is not something that I see myself using, with categories fulfilling much the same type of role; I am unconvinced by the idea of tag clouds, the type of thing that it powers. However, there are some useful extras here, and the filtering of posts by edit status is one of these. Having pending review as a publishing status sounds like a tweak that I might use to allow myself a cooling-off period before I publish a post for all the world to see. Revisiting something with a fresher pair of eyes might stop typographical howlers from emerging into public view...
Update: Another 2.3 feature discovered! I have picked up on multiple category widgets by virtue of the fact that category styling disappeared with the upgrade of the offline version of this blog to 2.3 RC1. Adding "-1" to the relevant CSS class definitions soon sorted things out. It does support the idea of testing before implementation, even if no other unexpected changes were spotted. I still am not sure why anyone would have multiple category listings, though.
18th September 2007
It was on this date several months ago that I moved my hillwalking blog into the world of WordPress. It's a self-hosted WordPress instance and has been for all that time. Because of the move, I was taken into the world of MySQL, one that intrudes still to this day. Most of the time for the migration was spent setting up a theme to fit in with the rest of the website, of which it forms an essential part. The matter of importing all the old posts took up time too, especially when it came to fixing glitches with the XML import. Still, it was all done within a weekend, and my website hasn't looked back since. More people now have a reason to visit, and the blog may even have surpassed the photo gallery as the site's main attraction. I kept up the old blog for a while but have dispensed with that by now; I was keeping both blogs synchronised and that became a tiring manoeuvre. Another upshot of the whole experience is that I have become more aware of the UK outdoor scene and learnt a thing or two too. It might even have encouraged me to go from day tripping to multi-day backpacking, a real-world change that is well removed from the world of technology.
25th May 2007
Furthering my excursions into things related to Google, I have been giving Google Analytics a whirl for my hillwalking and photo gallery website. Aside from the fact that it is updated once a day, it could have enabled me to eject WordPress plug-ins like Popularity Contest and FireStats getting the chop. As it happens, I also have a Google Analytics plugin installed, but a little editing of the blog template that I have developed would get rid of that too.
That’s enough about WordPress plug-ins; let’s return to Google Analytics. It has all the usual stuff: who’s visiting, from where are they coming, what are they using to see your site, etc. In addition, it captures if they are coming back, how long they are staying on the site and how deep they are going. Bounce rate is another term that features heavily: it is when a user only goes to one page and then leaves. With a blog, this unfortunately seems to come out as a high figure and that is ironic given that the blog was meant to promote the online photo gallery; it has very much taken on a life all of its own. There’s more to the information from Google Analytics, and it’s all useful stuff, of which I plan to make good use to improve how my site works.
17th May 2007
WordPress 2.2 made its debut yesterday and, after a spot of cautious testing, I upgraded my hillwalking blog to use it. The reason for the testing was that self-hosted WordPress blogs can now have what WordPress.com blogs have had for a while: built-in widget capability. It was this that upped my level of caution, but the changes weren't as drastic as I had feared: you need to amend your theme for widgets to be supported, and not having done this causes no untoward effects. Making themes widget compatible is something that Automattic describe in a helpful article on their website. Other than this, WordPress 2.2 doesn't cause much upheaval and, apart from pieces of JavaScript snagging on occasions in Firefox, all seems well. I am still sitting on the fence as regards those widgets, though...
18th March 2007
After reading an article in the latest issue of PC Plus, I got curious about the world of content management systems again. I went over to OpenSourceCMS to sample the CMS demos that they have got on there. Mambo and Joomla! (I wish they dropped that exclamation mark; it messes up automated grammar checking) are fully fledged CMS’s and look impressive too, though how they would fit into my online presence is something of an open question. Since I spied that PHP-Nuke uses themes, that is an attraction; I am already used to that mindset thanks to WordPress. While Drupal is seemingly less slick than the others, that could be an attraction in itself; it does offer themes but no rich text editing is available.
Though all of the above are built on top of PHP/MySQL, I ignored them for some reason when I last looked at open-source content management systems. That does seem a strange thing to do, but this was a while ago and the moderate cost of adding database functionality to my website was not something that I was willing to pay, though I have done so since for HennessyBlog.
Therefore, I ended up seeing what Plone (built on Zope and using the Python programming language) could do. What I was had in mind at the time was a replacement for Perl-powered photo gallery, and a CMS was never going to fit the bill; it still doesn’t. In any case, Plone left me with the impression that it was an all or nothing affair when I like coexistence of website components on a single server. Things may have changed since then, so giving it another go remains an option.
Now that I have decided to have a look at Drupal, the emphasis this time is not on using it as a photo gallery platform; if I wanted that, I’d go with the API for something like Flickr or Zooomr. This time, the emphasis on using a CMS to manage the visitor information directories on my website. It does coexist with the other website components, including WordPress and the aforementioned bespoke built photo gallery. Interestingly, Drupal does offer blogging functionality if I wanted it.
Set up involved a spot of work with MySQL before moving onto other things:
mysql -u adminuserid -p /* logging in*/
create database drupal; /*creating new database*/
grant ALL on drupal.* to adminuser identified by “**********”; /* granting access to new database */
quit; /* exiting */
Because it is easier to see what’s going on (not wrong, hopefully), I prefer command line working with MySQL. For some reason, Drupal comes only in tar.gz archives, so I extracted this into the web server directory and opened up the site in Firefox. Installation only requires the set-up of database access and is soon completed. A few things turned up in the status report that needed attention: cron, this can be run manually; activation of PHP Unicode and GD library (PHP’s gd_info function is a real help in testing this) extensions, editing of php.ini to remove commenting semicolons activated them and restarting Apache made them available; having a place to store uploads, the directory called files got created.
Since then, I have set about bending it to my will, not always an easy thing to do with software. The first thing to do was to give it a static home page. By default, Drupal places tasters for any nominated pages and stories on its home page and shows configuration instructions until you allow some content to filter through. However, adding the Front Page module allows you to override this behaviour and have something more static. It was an entry on Kehan’s Blog that set me heading in the right direction.
The next steps were to persuade the thing to allow external links to exist in menus (though patches exist, I have yet to learn how to apply them other than finding the nefarious piece of code and replacing, a considerable challenge that makes me wonder if there is not a better way to do it: with a module, perhaps?) and carry on the theme editing until it ties in with the rest of my site. Then, I’ll make the decision whether to replace my current workflow (Perl-powered pre-processing of XML into PHP/XHTML using XSLT and the Saxon parser followed by FTP upload to the web server) with this one. The automation of the former argues in its favour. We’ll see how things pan out…
24th February 2007
Solo Technology has posted about a nice extra available in the Visual Editor in WordPress 2.1. Hit ALT+SHIFT+V in Firefox and ALT+V in IE, gets you an extra row of buttons adding more editing options. He is currently trying to add a button to the main bar for doing the toggling.
P.S. While on the subject of blog post management, I have been playing around with w.bloggar, and I have to say that it works well; with a spot of persuasion, it even edits WordPress blog pages. The only things attempting to spoil the experience are the odd instances where odd characters get added to blog posts or characters in posts get misinterpreted. I'll try to add more in time.
1st February 2007
Though it seems strange to say it, I am making good use of Word’s blogging capabilities. Having had WordPress.com’s blog editor mangle one of my posts – incidentally while using Opera as my browser - is the cause of this turn of events.
When setting up new accounts, there are a number of presets available to be used to work with major blogging providers such as Blogger, WordPress, and Typepad. This is not all, though, as it is possible to hook up to other blogs in a more generic fashion. In fact, I have able to hook up to my other WordPress-powered blog; hosted on the same server as my personal website and with all the associated programming and scripting handled by myself. Where you have a number of accounts set up in the application, a drop-down menu appears in the post so that you can select the account to be used.
Speaking of dropdown menus embedded in the post, you can add categories to a post from the blog server’s own collection, and you can have more than one in any post. This feature is a boon, as is the ability to edit posts that are already on there, yet Word only seems to show a subset of all the posts on the server, about 20 I think, rather than each one. Another caveat is that you need to use a separate window for each post, or you’ll end up overwriting posts in error. Whether this is a result of RSS feed settings or is intrinsic to Word itself remains something that I have yet to discern. As it is Word, formatting, insertion of objects such as hyperlinks and images is very much part of the package. That said, uploading images via this route was not something that I tested until I was writing this post, but it seems to work well.
Apart from the irritations discussed above, I did find Word crashing a few times, but no data got lost thanks to its seemingly excellent file recovery capabilities, a definite counterpoint to some of my experiences with Word’s file recovery feature in previous versions. Eventually, the Office Diagnostics tools kicked in to see if all was well and, after carrying out both hardware (memory, hard drive, etc.) and software checks, an installation repair was performed. Let’s see if this resolves the issue. Even so, the crash repair and diagnostics were not something that I had seen to the same extent in previous versions of Office, and they did look pretty impressive.
In summary, Word does seem to be a good blogging tool, but I wouldn’t use it on its own because of its inability to download a full list of posts for editing. A blog’s own interface will remain necessary for that. Also, Word is far from being the only “offline” blog editor out there, and I am tempted to have a look at the likes of BlogJet and w.bloggar.