Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
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.
Unfortunately, due to a spot of hosting trouble, this blog was offline for a few days while I was getting things sorted out. Along the way, I learned a few lessons about web hosting that I’ll share soon. In the meantime, I’ll continue to set in place the last few bits and pieces that made the site’s precessor what it was.
An idea recently popped into my head for my hillwalking website: collecting a listing of bus services of use and interest to hillwalkers. Being rural, these services may not get the publicity that they deserve. In addition, they are generally subsidised so any increase in their patronage can only help maintain their survival.
Currently, the list lives on on several pages page in the blog but another thought has come to mind: using WordPress to host the list as a series of log entries, a sort of blog if you like. Effectively, that would involve having two blogs on the same website it can be done. One way is to set up up two instances of WordPress and they could work from the same database; the facility for this is allowed by the ability to use different table prefixes for the different blogs so that there are no collisions. There’s nothing to stop you having two databases but your hosting provider may charge extra for this. This set up will work but there is a caveat: you now have two blogs to maintain and, with regular WordPress releases, that means an extra overhead. Apart from that, it’s a workable approach.
Another option is to use WordPress MU. That would cut down on the maintenance but there are costs here too. It’s need of virtual hosts is a big one. If my experience is any guide, you probably need a dedicated server to go down this route and they aren’t that cheap. I needed to do a spot of Apache configuration and some editing of my hosts file to get my own installation off the ground; I don’t reckon that would be an option with shared hosting. Once I sorted out the hosts with a something.something.else address, set up was very much quick and easy.
Apart from a tab named Site Admin, the administration dashboard isn’t at all that different from a standard WordPress 2.3.x arrangement. In the extra tab, you can create blogs and users, control blogs and themes as well upgrade everything in a single step. Themes and plugins largely work as usual from an administration point of view. With plugins, you have just to try them and see what happens; one adding FCKEditor threw an error while the editor window was loading but it otherwise worked OK. I had no trouble at all with themes so all looks very well on that front.
Importing and editing posts worked as usual but for two perhaps irritating behaviours: tags are, not unreasonably, removed from titles and inline styled and class declarations are removed from tags in the body of a blog entry. Both could be resolved by post processing in the blog’s theme but the Sniplets plugin allows a better way out for the latter and I have been putting it to good use.
In summary, WordPress MU worked well and looks a very good option for multi-blog sites. However, the need for a dedicated server and the quirks that I have seen when it comes to handling post contents keep me away from using it for production blogs for now. Even so, I’ll be retaining it as a test system anyway. As regards the country bus log, I think that I’ll be sticking with the blog page for the moment.
I don’t know if this might become a series but a sequel to an earlier post might be a sign of things to come. I was pulling another version of WordPress from Subversion and noted a lot of updated files coming through, more than usual. Curiosity led to my having a look and there have been a few obvious tweaks. The most noticeable of these is that the Plugins portlet was now active, making its role clearer. The role? Apparently, it feeds a random selection of WordPress plugins from those included in WordPress.org’s own listings. It might be useful or an annoying diversion but we’ll see what comes; it is unconfigurable for now. Otherwise, the admin screens look a little sharper, especially to the ones for editing and managing content. I’ll continue to await the arrival of the ability to apply admin screen themes: its a "TODO" on the dashboard screen and could be interesting if it were to come about. We’ll see…
I recently updated the icon that appears beside this blog’s address in the address bar and bookmarks menus of some browsers. I gave it a go in GIMP but I seemed to get no joy. I pottered out on the web to discover what I might have done wrong only to find Dynamic Drive offering online favicon.ico creation. Out of curiosity, I decided to give the thing a whirl and download the result to upload onto my web server. GIF’s, JPG’s PNG’s and BMP’s with a size less than 150 KB are accepted and it did work for me.
Moving from one operating system to another like I have means that a certain amount of migration is in order. I have already talked about migrating my email but there are lesser acts too. One of these is carrying across bookmarks into the new world. This should be an easy thing to achieve and, for the most part, it is. However, the Import… entry on the File menu of the main browser only brings in bookmarks from other applications. To get more flexibility, you need to open up the Bookmarks Manager window from the Bookmarks menu (Organise Bookmarks… is the entry that you need). The File menu of the Bookmarks Manager has entries named Import… and Export…; their functions should be very apparent. The former will read from a file, very useful if you do not want to disrupt what you already have. Another migration option is the potentially disruptive act of copying in an alternative bookmarks.html file into your Firefox profile folder and overwriting the one that’s already there.
There seems to be a percolation of plugins that aim to change the appearance of WordPress administration pages from their day-glow blue to something more pleasing; Earthtones is the one that I use for this blog but I have also been known to use WP Tiger Administration as well. Both options work well, though the latter needs some adjustments to work as well with WordPress 2.3 as it does with the 2.2 line. One area that they both fail to influence is the appearance of the upload screen. It doesn’t help that upload.php, the underlying PHP script, is a dual purpose animal: used in an iframe in the post editing page and standalone for upload management. Curiously, you can only upload files on the post editing page and not on the upload management screen, a definite quirk. The thing that really stops these admin theme plugins gaining any sort of purchase with upload.php is that it also uses an auxiliary stylesheet, upload.css, that is called after the WordPress function hook has been defined; if it came before this, then the styles in upload.css could be overridden. You could edit upload.php and edit the replacement stylesheet but the former activity would require repeating at every WordPress upgrade. I chose to edit upload.css and will keep that is a safe place so that I can replace the file following an upgrade. If upload.php was treated like every other admin script, then this would be unnecessary. A useful suggestion for Automattic, perhaps?
On my web design journey, I have learned the wisdom that CSS styles for hyperlinks should be defined like the following:
a:link {…}
a:visited {…}
a:hover {…}
a:active {…}
List out the names of the pseudoselectors and you’ll soon work out where they got LVHA: Link, Visited, Hover and Active. However, I have recently spotted the following being used:
a {…}
a:hover {…}
The trick here is to define your style globally and only define specifics for the relevant pseudoselector, hover in this example. It works well in the likes of Mozilla and Opera but Internet Explorer is another story. Even IE7 needs the LVHA treatment. I spotted this when I observed unexpected changes in the appearance of link text after visiting the link: visited links startes to change colour. While I know that the likes of Jakob Nielsen frown upon non-changing link colour, I choose to ignore this and keep it constant so following the LVHA approach is needed to keep things as I would like them.
Here’s something that I would really appreciate: a book on code cutting for WordPress customisation and extension. Having the Codex is all very fine but having a dead tree compendium that you can peruse at your leisure is a definite bonus. If there was a way to get the Codex on PDF and print it all off for easier reading, that would be progress. I believe that a publisher did plan to bring to the market something like what I want but author and publisher parted company, a pity. It would be great to see something like Apress’ Pro Drupal Development for WordPress. What about it, Automattic folks?
A little while back, I took to using the wonders of .htaccess directives to make my WordPress deployments more secure. It does work but has the disadvantage that desktop blog editors like Windows Live Writer, Word 2007 and w.bloggar cannot be used to update your blog. I must have a look at getting around this but I am sticking with using WordPress itself to do the editing for now (Dean Lee’s port of FckEditor for WordPress is working out very well, spurious codes notwithstanding).