RFD: WordPress 1.5

Anyway, David R., I notice your site is gone. Is this for good? Has it moved? How are you doing with the new Wordpress version?

I wouldn't say that - I managed to learn enough Perl to hack on other people's complex programs in about two or three months.

The main choice between MT and WP comes down to server resources and page views: do you want your server to have to generate the page every time it's viewed, or only when the page changes?

The main choice between MT and WP comes down to server resources and page views: do you want your server to have to generate the page every time it's viewed, or only when the page changes?

Very true. There are undeniable advantages to having a static index page. For archive pages, dynamic generation wins every time. With MT, you can mix 'em up and do both, and that's very nice. Then again, MT is complicated both in the user interface and in the back end, and I've has problems with it that I can't even fathom the reason for, much less fix myself.

Mmm, I like the fact that MT lets you generate PHP or HTML according to whatever's most suitable.

(I do that myself, but only for semi-pointless eyecandy like random image rotation. Oh, and changing cardinal numbers to ordinals - I was a bit annoyed that MT's date function didn't do ordinals, so I wrote a PHP func to fix that)

I have MT installed on herjazz.org but i want to switch to WP. can i install this in the same directory i have MT installed, or do i have to start a new one?

It's sort of gone. I'm hiding it for the time being, if only because (like I said in my 1st post) the amount of comment / trackback spam I've rec'd recently has gotten unmanageable (1000+ POSTED spam comments in the past week, never mind the stuff that's posted but not showing to visitors because of my comment word watchlist), and because of how or where I had WP located in my web directory, stuff like spaminator didn't seem to work (and I'm never in the mood to monkey w/ that stuff). Also, I just needed a clean break from the "history" of popshots (which, of course, is why my new blatherlog is a sub-directory of popshots).

MT is likely installed in your cgi bin -- that's not necessary with php. It runs from anywhere on the server. What you want to do is install all the WordPress files in your main directory, in this case /mt/. Maybe make a new root folder called "maria" instead? At any rate, you just upload everything to that folder. Boom.

You will likely need to create a new database and export everything from MT. You can find instructions for that on the Wordpress support forum.

in order to have more than one blog on the site, i have to install mulitple versions of WP? doesnt that just seem like a bit... much?

i use this space to host mine and someone else's blog. it is not a group blog. originally i wanted to upgrade MT to its current release but i cant warrant spending 70$. so i thought id switch to wordpress [since a lot of people like it] and run a test blog. I want to switch both of our blogs to WP but it just feels like a lot to have two separate databases / applications running on the same site.

You don't have to pay.

Maybe, but it's really small. It's a matter of installing about 500k worth of files in two different directories. Not at all like installing MT twice, which would of course be a monster.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page

Everything you need to know is here somewhere.

-- James Mitchell (jame...), February 28th, 2005. (James Mitchell) (link)

if you want more than one user, yes you do.

when you put it that way, you're right. so i think i will do this.

oops xp yeah!

It's a question of morals, I guess.

if you've got an older version, you're good as well cause i believe the user license is fairly open ended at that version. (< 3.0) i run an MT site right now... the site was my custom perl script, then moved through a couple versions of MT and a couple hosts. our install is older. we use blacklisting stuff as well as this image number code that makes it really, really annoying for a comment-spammer to try to spam our site. it still happens, but it's like two spams instead of hundreds. they usually see their scripts don't work and give up.

we may switch to wp. i'm excited about some things, but not so excited about multiple installs. like maria, i've got multiple blogs running and i'll have to do some fudging to crank out some of our custom hacks. but php can be cake once you've had some xp with it. after churnin out perl code for years, php looks and feels very cozy.

i'm a little here or there on the static vs. dynamic issue. you never know when some random page on your site gets linked by the wrong site and suddenly your site is getting it's ass kicked, etc.

BUT, i'd take free, up-to-date software over stuff that's getting older and older. our MT install will only get more vulnerable over time. perhaps i'm paranoid. yeah, probably. that and we have just enough authors and blogs to push us to the $99 price, which isn't a lot, but our site generates little to no revenue so... that comes outta burrito funds, etc.

ANYWAY, question for you WP users... would you say changing the look/feel of different blogs is fairly easy for html knowledgable folks? we're hoping it'll be easier for other peeps with less coding knowledge to make easy changes to their look.

any thoughts?
m.

One thing that's pretty cool with the theming system is it makes it very easy to apply user themes -- give your users a choice between not just different stylesheets, but whole different functions that are included in this or that theme. One index page could have a sidebar and another would not, for example. You could have two completely different looking, working, and feeling sites that share a database. I'm too much of a control freak to just let users choose between any of the pre-made templates out there -- I won't put any kind of "switcher" up until I've written all the themes myself. BUT... I have this habit of redesigning my blog for fun, so this is perfect. A gallery of blog designs.

if ($id == "links)
(do this)
elseif ($id == "categories")
(do this)
elseif ($id == "archives")
(do this)
else
(do what you'd normall do)

Is that more or less correct? And do I need to wrap the "do this" in any special kind of syntax? The php manual gets the basic idea across, but uses "echo" in every example everywhere, and I don't see a single echo in the current template, so obviously I don't need to wrap whole sections of the page in quote marks, do I? And other php functions won't execute inside an echo will they?

<?
if ($id == "links) {
echo $myvariable;
echo myfunction($myvariable);
?>
here is some static text that never changes.
<?
} elseif ($id == "categories") {
echo $myvariable2;
echo myotherfunction($myvariable2);
} elseif ($id == "archives") {
echo $myvariable3;
echo myfunction($myvariable3);
} else {
echo $myvariable;
echo myfunction($myvariable);
?>
this is the else clause... i hope this example helps you.
<?
}
?>

does that make some sense? echoes aren't always needed if other functions call echo, etc inside of them and many do. you can call functions in an echo statement, but the echo will print their return value... and as i said... if functions echo, then there will be printed output there as well.

i just need to install WP and get playing around.
m.

first off, here's my blog:

http://herjazz.org/maria/

the thing im having troubles with, is getting a link to the main page on individual entries. you know, it normally looks like this:

blashlafdfsjkdfhhj | main | oiertuioeutoertoeio

what tag do i need for this and where should it go?

im using the default [kubrick] template.

any other hints / advice would be useful as well!

Right now you have a div (called "headerimg") that has a background of your main image. The easiest way to turn this into a link back to your main page is to put the link on the page instead of in the background. So the HTML on the main page would read:

<div id="header">
<div id="headerimg">
<a href="/maria/"><img src="/maria/wp-content/themes/default/images/personalheader.jpg"></a>
</div>

Then add this to your stylesheet:

#headerimg img {border="0"}

And that should do it.

http://herjazz.org/maria/uncategorized/2

as you can see in this link, there's no "main" in between the navigation for the previous and next posts.

However!

If you go into you index.php template for Kubrick, you'll see a line (probably lines 26-29) that says:

< div class="navigation">
< div class="alignleft">< ?php posts_nav_link('','','« Previous Entries') ?>< /div>
< div class="alignright">< ?php posts_nav_link('','Next Entries »','') ?>< /div>
</div>

That's your navigation top bar. Without messing with what's there, you want to add:

< div class="aligncenter">< a href="/maria/">Mainlt; /a>< /div>

Then add to your stylesheet:

.aligncenter {float:left; textalign:center;}

This may or may not put it in the center -- I didn't try it.

< div class="aligncenter">< a href="/maria/">Main< /a>< /div>

What I meant about the header was to take the image out of the stylesheet as a background and put it on the main page as an image, linked back to your home page, and with a border set to zero to avoid any ugly link borders that a browser will impose.

greentrack is one of my favorite themes. i have changed a bunch of things on it and soon, i'll probably just create my own custom theme with an entirely different layout.

so far so good tho.
m.

how can i make it stop doing this?

I didn't see any examples of this when I went to your site, though! I did get some JS error, though, which might be WHY I'm not seeing anything. Can you link to a specific post? (I ain't blaming you for the JS error, BTW; I blame IE.)

acronym, abbr, span.caps
{
	font-size: 0.9em;
	letter-spacing: .07em;
	}

Take out "span.caps" and leave the "acronym, abbr."

(me, i'm trying to install coppermine photogallery but apparently i am not the geek i thought i was *sigh*)

http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol8/usability_no1.htm

FYI: if you're using kubrick as your base template, you'll need to go all the way down to the bottom of the stylesheet and change/remove the code for acronym, abbr, span.caps in the "Begin Various Tags & Classes" section to make this thing go away.

is this the only wordpress thread? man alive, editing things is still such a chore. they need a better posting/editing system for starters (inc better html tools (e.g. click one button to apply a h1 tag etc.)

any new exciting wordpress rivals worth looking at?

I think this is why I wanna shut down my website. That and I don't have anything interesting to say anymore. :-(

I always loved greymatter. Was that the name? That's what I used way back hwhen I started my first site/blog.

+1 blueski. wordpress looks nice but editing the fucker is so daunting and frustrating i pretty much stopped keeping my blog.

I dunno -- should I give WP another shot? I haven't been back to it in a couple years, but I was turned off by the page structure. One of the main things I like to do with my blog is redesign it a thousand times, and WP has done a fantastic job of widget-izing every possible element of every page, and it's not awfully malleable -- at least, not in the way I'm thinking. Movable Type 4 has the same problem. Before you can really redesign the thing, you have to figure out how it's put together in the first place, so it's a lot of working backwards, and fuck it. It's the kind of thing that makes perfect logical sense if you write it yourself, but I'm not going there just now. I'm sure I could cobble together some poopy, totally insecure php that would make perfect sense to me, but that would take even longer, and anyway it would be a waste of my better energy.

So I'm a dinosaur. I use MT 3.6. I know it pretty much top-to-bottom, and I can throw it up on a site in five minutes and then open Photoshop and get right to the fun part.

Meh, I don't like it. I also hate that you have two options (HTML and just plain text) which confuses the fuck outa me. Also I prefer Greymatter cause it had a much bigger text box instead of WP which is pretty tiny, I think. That said, you have a gazillion layout options which you can pretty much tweek at pleasure until the year 48484.

One of the main things I like to do with my blog is redesign it a thousand times

this is the first time i've integrated a blog with my site which I rejig the look of with the seasons but it seems versatile enough to withstand future rejiggery. it's all in the css i guess. i agree tho that to do anything big takes a lot of working backwards and i am pretty tired of it.

really want to move a casual client's site from MT to WP (or a better newer equivalent) but too much work for too little reward frankly.

editing the fucker is so daunting and frustrating

Uh? I've never had a problem with that at all!

Is Greymatter still developed and/or supported? Anyway, I'm kinda cringing at that option. It's open source, yeah, and I'm all for that, but MAN does their webpage look the part. There's no mistaking that "designed by programmers" look.

i was trying to do a cut post so you click 'read more' for the whole thing but it wouldn't work and just wiped the cut text completely. this is easier to do on freakin' livejournal.

i find it's a lot to do with what natalie said about there being two ways of editing things. it looks fine in the editor but when you see the final thing there can be huge paragraph lines that the editor insists on adding to it or the pictures are all in the wrong place.

xpost to ned

I thought you just had to put in a "!more" tag that inserts the "CLICK HERE" link and hides the subsequent text for you? What version are you using, blueski?

I'm 2nding Ned's WTF wrt people complaining about WP's text-editing ease -- if anything, it's uploading PICTURES through the interface that's a bitch.

well, i dislike its complexity. yes, i find the two options complex. *shrug* i keep being confused and will put html code in the first box which leads to a fucked up entry. also, I CANT GET PICS TO BE CENTER. i think what i mean is that it has too many "bells". fuck it, i like simplicity.

also, i have a massive migraine so this entry might come across... whatever.

I CANT GET PICS TO BE CENTER

<img src="foo,jpg" style="display:block; margin:auto;" />

kenan, that didn't help my migraine. ;-)

I'm sorry. :(

foo,jpg

i can't even work out how to change the fucking font or alignment in fucking stupid wordpress

ok what the hell do i have to know "css"???? fuck. that. shit.

body {
font-face: whateveryouwant;
}

lol sorry, i mean --

font-family: whateveryouwant;

i don't understand what you mean at all!

is that something i type? where?

Look for "body {" in the style.css template and add the line "text-align: justify/left/right/whatever;" if it's not there.

alignment didn't work

don't know what the font i want is called

seriously why is it like this? totally impossible to figure out or navigate

because making a fully featured n00b-friendly idiot-proof web publishing system is non-trivial.

how can i make my wordpress blog start with the oldest post at the top and list my posts chronologically as you go down the page, with the very newest right at the end?

seems like something real simple but im having no luck finding an option for this, is there a plugin?

kidna matters with this as my first post explains everything, important to read that first. so it runs like a standard narrative. would tumblr or something be better for this?

So my wordpress blog was just deactivated. I imagine this is a mistake, but its obviously very annoying. Anyone have this happen to them before? How long does it take before you get any sort of response? Why does this even happen in the first place?

I don't really do webdev anymore so I haven't paid any attention to the Mullenweg vs. WPEngine fight but I thought this article about it was pretty good
https://tedium.co/2024/09/25/wordpress-wp-engine-open-web-negative-effects/