After the WP development team spent the Summer on improving the WP community’s infrastructure, they are back with WordPress 3.1, now in beta 1, the next version of this year’s Open Source CMS “Hall of Fame”-Award winning CMS. New features include improved internal linking, standard post formats, query improvements and a couple of other administration related improvements (like ajaxified sorting of columns). They recently published the first beta – check out the official post for some more information.
Schlagwort-Archive: Wordpress
Happy with WordPress.
I’m rather happy with the current path the WP community is following – notable cool things in the upcoming months will include
- create your own post types from within the admin panel (#9674 (Better support for custom post types) – WordPress Trac)
- BuddyPress will become a feature for standard WP.org installations
- Custom taxonomies are becoming progressively easier to implement
- It’s getting progressively easy to work with custom fields.
- There are two WP Google Summer of Code projects dealing with AJAX inline reordering of pages on the manage post screens.
That said, I’m not sure I really need the media handling improvements now the focus of the WP 2.9 development. But I think it’s a generally a good thing. Now if they only allow easy flickr integration or API searching of pictures from the edit screens and improve the internal linking features, I’d have a hard time to find a lot of thigs I still don’t like about WordPress…
My WordPress 2.8 wishlist
With the upcoming release of WP 2.7, the software is maturing a lot, and it’s also getting a lot more sexy, and not just visually. But if you know humans – we’re known to have unsatisfiable needs – it won’t surprise you that there are some things I’d like to see in version 2.8 that are not in version 2.7 yet. Here is a short list of the more important ones –
- nested AJAX sorting of all hierarchical structures in WordPress – pages, categories, possible other taxonomies
- on-the-fly creation of pages on the page management screen like it’s been done with categories in 2.7
- easier selecting and managing of categories and tags via AJAX
- an is_child() function to test if a particular hierarchical element is a direct or indirect child of another element
- inline editing of post and page contents
- better media/image handling
Looking beyond 2.8, I’d definitely like to see the creation of new post types and taxonomies to become core features, the latter effectively giving WP the ability to “simulate” a multiblog without really being one.
Finally a “Wow.” out of the box.
The Visual Design of WordPress 2.7
For the last couple of years, I’ve been using WordPress for a number of blogs and small websites that I have built. One of the first things I changed was the admin user interface. WP has strengths and weaknesses under the hood, but the admin UI that came with it was never nice to look at. The core developers even hired a supposedly expensive web usability consultancy, happy cog, for a redesign of the admin area of WP 2.5, and all they got was an interface for which there were plugins available even before the release of the version itself. So I suppose it wasn’t too big a surprise when, this summer, rumours and then a special branch of WP (“crazyhorse”) appeared that once again radically changed the admin interface. And now, a couple of weeks prior to the prospective release date of WP 2.7, there are the first visuals of what WP 2.7 is really likely to look. Some elements thereof were already apparent to those using the nightly builds of the software, but there are also a lot of changes that, for the first time, give WP a look that doesn’t hurt my eye but instead allows me to say “Wow!” out of the box.
The funny thing is, though, that, apparently – quoting the WP developer blog – the design has mostly been done by Matt Thomas and Andy Peatling (who is otherwise the buddypress guy at automattic) over the course of the last week. Which – for all the excitement – begs the question: why not earlier?
To have a look at some mockup screens and read even more about this, check out the link below.
Comparing Apples with… Apples.
In all the years – ok the couple of years – that I’ve been using blog-CMS I’ve not seen a more pointless discussion of the relative merits of the systems Movabletype and WordPress. Still, enjoy the absurdity…
The Multiplicative Hypothesis » God I Hate WordPress
By the way, almostadiary.de was first on Blogger/blogspot, then on MT, then, briefly, on Expression Engine, and now it is on WordPress. All systems have strengths and weaknesses. But they are usually related to the way they are handling content, not the templating. Currently, in my opinion, EE is the most flexible, but also the most complex system and spam protection did not work well. WordPress is less flexible, mostly because it’s a single blog system, but it’s fast, easy to SEO, there’s a hack or plugin for everything, and it’s good on Spam protection.
That’s why I’m using WP at the moment. But the login effect is hardly impossible to overcome. And WP really needs todo something about the admin interface.
Chantier 2.1
Maybe not the most SEO friendly title but, well, who cares. Chantier just sounds better than construction site. But I do like the sound of scaffolding, which alas, isn’t really necessary for a construction site on the web – which this blog still is and, now, finally, the reason for this entry, will remain for a bit.
I have to say that it probably was not the wisest decision to migrate to WordPress when WordPress itself is in the process of a major migration. So, while the extensive availability and hackability of WordPress are a significant part of the software’s fascination, they are also a prime example for the problems that will haunt any distributed development project, but particularly if it is open sourced.
I like the advantages of WordPress 2.1, but the version has its problems as well. Just a couple of examples – the /category/-less Hack by Jörg Petermann, which I prematurely claimed also works effortless under 2.1 actually kills category RSS feeds, the Podpress plugin, albeit allegedly fixed for 2.1 doesn’t work or, according to the forums, at least doesn’t work as it’s supposed to be, my main admin page now displays parts of my blog using my blog’s CSS when logging in, but not when using a link from within the admin area, and the RSS templates seem somwhow messed up in general.
So, as much as being 2.1 in the age of 2.0 sounds appealing, being at the forefront of innovation clearly comes with a price tag. Make sure you’re willing to pay if you’re upgrading…
WordPress 2.1 ohne /category/-Prefix
Update
(29/01/2007) Der Hack ist doch nicht ganz problemlos, da er (zumindest bei mir) dazu führt, daß Kategorienfeeds nicht mehr angezeigt werden. Also Vorsicht beim Einsatz. Im WP support Forum gibt es zur Zeit auch noch keine Lösung.
Nachdem ich bei der – noch immer nicht vollständigen – Renovierung von almostadiary.de enorm von durch google zusammengetragenen Informationsstückchen bzgl. der Anpassung von WordPress profitiert habe, hier ein erster, zaghafter Versuch, der “Community” etwas zurückzugeben.
Im vergangenen Januar veröffentlichte Jörg Petermann auf einfach-persoenlich.de einen kleinen WordPress Hack, der es ermöglichte, in allen WP 2.0x Versionen, das Prefix “/category/” aus den Permalinks zu entfernen. Der Trick bestand darin, das Prefix für die mod-rewrite Regel bzgl. Kategorien in der Datei “/wp-includes/classes.php” zu einem leeren String zu machen und dann die Reihenfolge der Rewritefunktionen so zu ändern, daß die Regeln für Kategorien zuletzt ausgeführt werden. Zu Problemen kann es mit diesem System eigentlich nur dann kommen, wenn man eine Permalinkvariante wählt, in der die einzelnen Beiträge nur mit ihrem Slug versehen werden und diese zufällig einem Kategorie-Slug entsprechen – ein solches Szenario ist wohl einfach zu vermeiden.
Das gestern vorgestellte WordPress 2.1 allerdings hat eine veränderte Dateistruktur. Nicht mehr alle Funktionen sind an den Stellen zu finden, an denen man sie bis Sonntag Abend hätte suchen müssen. Die Rewrite Regeln, die für Jörg Petermanns Mini-Hack geändet werden müssen, finden sich nun nicht mehr in der Datei “wp-includes/classes.php” sondern in (so einsichtig, daß ich direkt dort nachgeschaut habe) der Datei “wp-includes/rewrite.php”. Gleichzeitig ist mit “$this->extra_rules” ein zusätzliches Regelelement hinzugekommen, das ich – in Unkenntnis seiner genauen Funktion – am Ende der Regelkette, also auch in der angepaßten Version hinter “$category_rewrite” stehen ließ – bisher traten keine Probleme auf.
Ansonsten hat sich an der Anwendung des Hacks von Jörg Petermann offenbar nichts geändert – etwas detailliertere Informationen über die Ausführung finden sich daher immer noch hier. Nur die geänderten Dateinamen berücksichtigen, dann sollte alles klappen.