WordPressing

Well, the Ides of December came and went, and no sign yet of WordPress 3.1 final build. Instead, the WordPress Dev Blog announced the release of WP 3.1 Beta 2, with a plea for people to download it and try it, and urgently test or report bugs.

I’m guessing that means something in the proposed WP 3.1 isn’t going according to plan – it’s not like the WordPress team to miss a release date for a final build.

What could be going wrong? It’s a bit debatable really – my recent experiences would lean me towards problems with the UI interfaces for Custom Post Types and Taxonomies, especially those related to archives and displaying those in templates – WordPress 3.0 to 3.0.3 all shipped without any native query system for the archives. Various plugins have emerged to take care of that, but they’ve been quirky at best.

Additionally, there’s been a LOT of flak flying towards WordPress for some of their underhanded moves this year – the capital_P_dangit unannounced forced editing of how you spell wordpress was one issue, the killing off of link cloaking plug-ins in the WP repository (to favour the wp.me link shortener in the WP.com Stats plug-in), and the later discovery of a user-behaviour trojan added officially to the stats plug-in, have both been controversial.

Depending on who you speak with, there’s also been issues related to the old WPMU 2.9.x VHOSTS constant, and how it was replaced in WP 3.0 – that topic resurfaced on the trac bug monitoring system recently, with lead devs admitting issues surround it, and looking to revert back to the WPMU 2.9.2 system of handling it.

Less discussed, but prominent to me (at least) has been the collapse of development and release of good magazine style themes in the WP repository since the release of WP 3.0 – the 2010 new default theme also had an urgent upgrade in the month between 3.0 and 3.0.1 but remains incredibly complex to understand the coding, compared to pre-WP 3.0 themes. Has the explosion in action hooks and filters, and their underlying architecture, made it just too complex to develop new themes of any complexity beyond one content column and a sidebar?

All of which leads me to think there’s some fundamental issues with the upcoming WordPress 3.1.0 and that even when it arrives, it may be better to hold off until a couple of bug-fix versions have appeared before upgrading – anyone for a repeat of the WP 2.5 and WP 2.8 fiascos?

If you’re the sort of person that takes umbrage easily, don’t read this post, skip to the next one.

Debugging WordPress plug-ins connecting to third-party services can be easy, if you think about what you’re doing.

One of the great strengths of WordPress is that it’s an enabler.  That is, it enables people to do something they may have never done before – build and run a website.  But just as you don’t need to have done it previously to parent a child, or own a pet, when you create a website, there comes with that certain responsibilities … continue reading…

In WordPress MU (WPMU), and in WordPress 3.x, webmasters can enable subdomain mode to create sub-sites of the main domain name (e.g. support.example.com as opposed to example.com/support/), but there has been a lot of online searching and discussion about why it apparently does not work with Plesk Panel hosting management control panel. This article provides the full answer, and the solution.

cPanel v Plesk hosting management control panel

There is already a lot of help and support on the internet for webmasters whose hosting service or servers use the cPanel control panel to manage their web-hosting environment, and countless tutorials for setting up the wildcard subdomain settings needed for WPMU and WordPress 3.x with multisite enabled (WP-MS).

However, there are almost no resources to help webmasters when their hosting service provide Parallels Plesk Control Panel instead of cPanel, and Plesk, apart from doing many things differently, has several quirks that do not exist in cPanel hosting.

The standardised instructions included for both WPMU and WP-MS for enabling sub-blogs / sub-sites work fine for cPanel based hosting, but do not for Plesk Panel based hosting, unless you are thoroughly familiar with Plesk’s idiosyncrasies. Several main developers at WordPress have repeatedly blamed hosting company incompetence when less skilled webmasters have sought help on the topic. The fault however, appears to lie not with the hosting companies, but with Parallels (the publishers of Plesk). continue reading…

It seems like just yesterday that WordPress announced there’d be no new version releases, other than any needed bug or security updates, for six months.  That was back in June when WordPress 3.0 was imminent (came out on the 17th).

Wow, how time flies – five months have rolled past and I still haven’t found time to get to grips with some of WP3′s key goodies – custom post types and taxonomies and the like.

Now I hear WordPress 3.1 will officially roll on 15th December 2010, and there’s sufficient changes I’m going to have to relearn a buch of what I spent the last five months getting to grips with.

This of course, comes on top of the new osCommerce 2.3 tableless CSS-driven version (which will be the last osC 2.x release before osC 3.0 with WordPress-like plugin and theme addition becomes available).

Who said it was going to be a restful and quiet winter?  No Christmas holidays for me at this rate.