TOPIC: TRAC
Removing a column from a MySQL data table
19th April 2010My 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.
Take a great leap forward, then consolidate...
12th June 2009While I have been a user of WordPress since late 2006, I only began to start keeping tabs on its development following my hearing news of dramatic changes coming in what became 2.5. Since a pattern developing with more significant changes coming in 2.5 and 2.7 while both 2.6 and 2.8 didn't add too much in the way of upheaval but rather evolved what was already there. With 2.8, theme and widget management got the once over, while there were plenty of other tweaks that polished a well received forbear. The differences between 2.7 and 2.8 are discernible without breaking anything that shouldn't be broken. In short, I rather like the result.
The reaction to 2.5 was mixed, to say the least, and that in part led to the dramatic changes in 2.7, especially regarding the administration interface. Now, I admit to having had doubts about these when I first saw them in development, especially when there was so much chopping and changing during development that stepping back until things settled down became a necessity. Even adding a ticket to the TRAC was problematical, unless you had sight of what was happening behind the scenes, because it became too easy to add an invalid ticket.
With the release of 2.8 into the wild, 2.9 is now on the horizon, and I am inclined to suspect that we might see more considerable changes again. For one thing, there was that interface poll a little while ago, so who knows what impact that may have on what comes next. The structure of the administration screens may not alter that much, but it still leaves changes to colours and icons with the aim of separating navigation from what else is on there, something that doesn't trouble me at all. In fact, I don't see very much wrong with how things are right now, which causes me to wonder if there's any point in making too many changes at all.
The forecasted incorporation of WPMU functionality is a bigger change that would mean the end of WordPress MU as a separate entity, and would concern me more with the amount of under the bonnet re-engineering that would be needed. Add Google Summer of Code projects to this mix and 2.9 looks as if it could be a step change in the spirit of 2.5 and 2.7, if not in feel. Summer 2009 could be very interesting for WordPress, leaving me to hope that it continues to work for me in the way that it does as we move from version to version.
Recursive FTP with the command line
6th August 2008Here's a piece of Linux/UNIX shell scripting code that will do a recursive FTP refresh of a website for you:
lftp <<~/Tmp/log_file.tmp 2>>~/Tmp/log_file.tmp
open ${HOSTNAME}
user ${USER} ${PSSWD}
mirror -R -vvv "${REP_SRC}" "${REP_DEST}"
EndFTP
When my normal FTP scripting approach left me with a broken WordPress installation and an invalid ticket in the project's TRAC system that I had to close, I turned to looking for a more robust way of achieving the website updates and that's what led me to seek out the options available for FTP transfers that explicitly involve directory recursion. The key pieces in the code above are the use of lftp in place of ftp, my more usual tool for the job, and the invocation of the mirror command that comes with lftp. The -R switch ensures that file transfer is from local to remote (vice versa is the default) and -vvv turns on maximum verbosity, a very useful thing when you find that it takes longer than more usual means. It's all much slicker than writing your own script to do the back-work of ploughing through the directory structure and ensuring that the recursive transfers take place. Saying that, it is possible to have a one line variant of the above, but the way that I have set things up might be more familiar to users of ftp.
Keeping an eye on WordPress development III
11th March 2008If the milestone date was to be believed, WordPress 2.5 was due yesterday. However, it has yet to show up, and a brief look at 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 difficult 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.