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The WordPress 3.0 Milestone

April 13, 2010 Technology / The Web
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Although it’s only slated for release sometime in May, the first beta of the new WordPress 3.0 is already doing the rounds. Blog Oh Blog has a nice summary of the changes and additions in the new version: most of the updates are fairly innocuous, perhaps the largest mention should go to the integration of WordPress-mu, for setting up multi-user blogs and networks.

However, the announcement that really put the cat amongst the pigeons has been that the core development team may now be promoting what were formally called canonical plugins, now known as core plugins following the unpublished results of a poll in December. It appears that whilst attempting to address a genuine issue, the very idea of having plugins that stand in the limelight with an official stamp of approval has incensed many community plugin developers.

Some really excellent debate has been held which has, amongst other things, revealed that the initial go ahead for core plugins will be very limited; just three plugins, including an old, out-of-date plugin, a chunk hived off from the core, and a newly developed plugin. Nevertheless, the potential for these core plugins to have wide-reaching effects on the plugin development pool, create stagnation in the community and a greater top-down hierarchy is something that in the eyes of many developers and enthusiasts, has not been addressed.

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Playing with the WordPress database

March 22, 2009 Technology / The Web
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After initially solving my database character encoding problems by ignoring the specific strings in the wp-config.php file, I was finally forced to alter the characters in the database during a recent reshuffle. Whilst there are two automated solutions available via plugin, namely g30rg3x‘s UTF-8 Database Converter and the Modified UTF8 Sanitize Plugin, sadly neither worked in my particular instance, and indeed the former is no longer supported for current versions of WordPress, though reports on the WordPress support forum suggest there should be no issues.

Fortunately, an excellent guide was available on Alex King’s blog. For more information and follow-up comments, you should definitely read the full post, but here’s a summary of the method that worked for me.
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WordPress 2.8 roadmap

December 25, 2008 General
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With the latest 2.7 release barely out of the door, the WordPress team are already looking to set out the roadmap for 2.8. The recent update had an impressive mix of tweaks, fixes, features and a nice interface overhaul, and their little survey has a list of tasks to prioritise for the next release. Unfortunately, however, the one thing I should really like to see doesn’t make an appearance, that being some simpler ways to create a multilingual blog built into the core. At the moment there are a number of plugins out there that offer to do just that, and whilst they may do exactly as they say on the tin, the potential for a plugin to become outdated and fall behind the current WordPress release could create a lot of work sometime in the future, not to mention the fact that each plugin goes about creating a multilingual environment in its own unique way. Whilst I’m not alone in calling for at least some standardised framework, I can’t see any progress being made in the near future.

Daily Links

May 6, 2008 Daily Links
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Plugoo – Talk with your site visitors through your favourite instant messenger with this blog plugin. The idea’s a nice one, though there would appear to be plenty of potential for abuse.

Spheers – Fancy downloading your brain? Alright, that’s not quite the idea, but spheers.com, currently in beta, seems to be offering a way of keeping tabs on all that digital information which passes our eyes so we can come back to it later.

Super Cook – A site which offers almost exactly what I wrote about in this post. A few features they could yet implement, but overall a pretty decent site for checking recipes and getting new ideas.

TypeRacer – Nice little game to improve your typing skills. Practice on your own or go head-to-head in a race with other players.

Relying on plugins

May 6, 2008 The Web
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Plugins can be a major boon. They can add variety to a site, integrate third party software, collect feedback, improve navigation, or add features. Occasionally they may become integral to the way a blog is run. But they can also become a burden or a major stumbling point. The recent WordPress 2.5 release made a large of plugins for the software incompatible, and outright broke a few. In those cases where plugins simply provide some added extraneous functionality, such breakages might not be a problem, but where they form an integral part of a blog the potential changes can bring a site to a halt.

Yet some downtime during a WordPress update is not the only worry when it comes to plugins. Whilst major updates often accentuate the problems, there is no guarantee that plugin authors will continue their work to cope with bugs and software changes. The small WPPA plugin currently used on this blog was recently broken by the WordPress update, but the author considered that the features introduced in the recent version might make his plugin obsolete, and only touched up the plugin to work with 2.5 (so far). Since I hardly post any photographs, such a change makes little difference to this site, but for many others migrating to another plugin could prove a major job if automated tools aren’t available. Others may have experienced such changes when moving between multilingual plugins as the features and support changed, from Language Picker, through Polyglot, to Language Switcher or WP_Multilingual. Such a migration might involve moving media around, altering themes, or having to change tags or syntax within WordPress posts.

How do you approach using plugins on WordPress? Do you consider WordPress should avoid leave extra features to the plugin authors rather than implementing features already well covered (e.g. tags, photos)? Should plugin authors attempt to implement migration tools or leave it to end-users to do the necessary conversions?

Another day, another plugin

February 24, 2008 Technology / The Web
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WordPress Plugins

With the news that WordPress Photo Album plugin potentially contains a security vulnerability, I decided it was probably time that I took stock of my increasingly long plugins list and removed some of the outdated and superfluous items. One of the greatest improvements to WordPress of late has been the automatic update checks provided for plugins listed on the official site, which whilst by no means universal does at least mean that updates for many popular plugins will automatically be reported without the need to check up on each one manually. This little list of what remains represents some of the better plugins I’ve encountered.

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To Blog, or Not to Blog

June 27, 2007 General
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WordPress

That is the question; as the well known soliloquy roughly goes. A Mind @ Play is now a year old, and not a day wiser, as far its author is concerned. Courtesy of GeneralStats, I can see that in the past year (excluding this post) there’ve been 57 posts, 18 comments/trackbacks, together a total of 31,400 words, and over 8,000 spam comments caught by Akismet. But to what end?

This isn’t intended to be another one of those ‘blogging about blogging’ posts, but occasionally one has to ask why we blog at all. I wouldn’t claim to be anything near an expert on the subject, but it would appear that the more successful blogs do just that: ‘blog about blogging’. Nor should that sound derogatory, some of them do an exceedingly good job of it, but there are only so many times you can read the ‘top 10 ways to get more readers’ et al. But then these people tend to come from the professional end of the blogging community, those who aim to earn something through their work. There were and are no such intentions with this blog, and if there are any advertisements on this site I can only say they are unintentional.

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