Author Archives: Ron Bieber

Continuing the WordPress Upgrade Work

Posted on by

I am continuing to work on the site and its migration to WordPress 2.0. Along with the upgrade of the main site, I’ve had to upgrade the following items:

  1. Ultimate Tag Warrior – I have upgraded this to version 2.8.9 to remove an error in the admin screens
  2. FAlbum (Integrated WordPress / Flickr Photo Album) – I have upgraded this to version 0.5.6. Along with getting everything to work properly, this version also gets rid of those missing images you saw in the photo album due to Flickr changing its URL scheme. With this work completed, the integrated photo album is now back up and running.

Right now, I think everything is working properly except for the comment issue when “wordpress” is in the permalink. If you find anything else broken, please let me know. I will continue to test over the next week or so.

Incidentally, the WordPress team is planning to release the official 2.0 release on December 26. Once that happens, I’ll go through the excercise again to ensure that I am on the most current version.

Overall, I think the WordPress team did a great job with this version of the software. For some additional information on WordPress 2.0, you might want to hit the following articles written by Owen Winkler:

Sourceforge (Finally) Putting Together Beta Service Offering for Subversion?

Posted on by

From the SourceForge Recent Enhancements section:

As of 2005-11, SourceForge.net staff are actively working to prepare a beta service offering related to the Subversion SCM. This offering will be provided in addition to our existing CVS service; there are no plans to discontinue CVS service. Pre-requisite analysis work has been initiated and hardware has been ordered.

This message was also posted to the Subversion mailing list:

From SourceForge’s site update note:

> As we enter a new calendar year, our focus remains on further
> improving the quality of our service. To that end, I am pleased to
> announce that SourceForge.net will offer Subversion in early January
> 2006, initially as a beta program available to approximately 50
> projects. Then, if the Subversion beta period proceeds as smoothly as
> we expect, we will deploy Subversion site wide by March, 2006.

So lets keep our eyes out for this one …

WordPress 2.0 Update

Posted on by

I found that if permalinks are on and the post-slug contains the word ‘WordPress’, the comments section would not appear on the post. I have submitted an issue to the WordPress team.

If you notice, I have changed the word ‘WordPress’ in each of the slugs to ‘wp’ and they work fine. An old post with WordPress in the slug can be found here. Notice – no comments section.

Obscure issues like this is why I don’t mind installing beta software in my production environment. Chances are, if you don’t run it for real, you won’t find this stuff.

WordPress 2.0 RC3 Upgrade

Posted on by

I decided to upgrade the site to WordPress 2.0 to see what the new version looks like. Currently, I’m having some problems with permalinks and some plugins may not work. I will continue debugging later on in the next two weeks. One thing I will say is the new version looks great. The admin section has been majorly overhauled, complete with AJAX enablement, drag and drop placement of sections within the admin screen, and live preview of your post so that you can see what you’ve written in context with your theme – something I’ve been waiting for for quite some time.

The main problem (that I know about right now) is that it seems as if the comments do not work on posts since the upgrade. For some reason, on newer posts you just cannot get to the comment template. I’m currently tracing through that to figure out what the deal is.

As I get the bugs worked out, I’ll post up the details of what I’ve found.

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML

Posted on by

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTMLLast week one of my team members requested a copy of Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman, as we are doing some work on a CSS implementation of our web site based on the results of some initial research that I had done back in June of this year. I started vacation on Friday and by Saturday I had a note from the post office saying that the book was sitting there waiting to be picked up (apparently our postal delivery person was too lazy to get out of the truck and leave it on the doorstep).

I started paging through the book a little and was a little suprised and put off by the format at first. It seemed to me to be almost formatted as a kids book, with large pictures, large type, and conventions like interviews being conducted with tags, or conversations between specifications. As we were on our way Christmas shopping I was actually reading it to the family and kind of goofing on it. I couldn’t believe that my team members actually requested a book like this that tried to explain things in such simple terms. It seriously felt like a ‘Dick and Jane’ book.

Well, thankfully I didn’t write it off and actually kept reading it. What I soon came to realize is that there is a reason that ‘Dick and Jane’ have been around since the earth cooled. These are some great books, removing all of the technical jargon out of your way and explaining the concepts in an extremely understandable way. The book makes the concepts seem much more realizable and less intimidating to actually try yourself. Surprisingly, I learned quite a bit that I didn’t know by hitting the O’Reilly books that I had read earlier and found myself thinking about the concepts much more frequently (and freely) than I did as I was wading through the highly technical format of these other books.

So while I started out goofing on the book, I found a ton of value in it, so much so that I’m going to grab a few more of them. I think I’ll start off with Head First Design Patterns and then work my way from there.

If you are looking to dip your toes into CSS and XHTML and want to understand the purposes and reasons for the different specifications, I highly recommend picking up this book. I was absolutely pleasantly surprised and found a ton of value in the format and presentation of the information. It was really cool to finally run across a series of books that teach the concepts so effectively while giving you just enough technical information to be able to work.

Pick this one up. You won’t be disappointed.