Category: b2

One problem with changing blog software is the fact that URLs change. I’ve provided a redirection rule here so you don’t need to change the settings in your aggregator. Take a look at the feed now if you like!

RewriteRule ^b2rss2.php(.*)? /wordpress/wp-inst/wp-feed.php?feed=rss2 [QSA]

Coming soon to a browser near you: WordPress on linux.ie! I’ve moved over a number of weblogs already and I’m fixing up the last few bugs.
The move over will happen on or near the 14th of September and I’ll update here with news and information as things progress.

WordPress doesn’t support autobr. I want to turn it off for my “Pic Of The Day” posts as the Javascript used gets confused by <br>.
I should have written a Smarty modifier to display those pictures in the first place, but now I’ll probably delve into WordPress plugins and hook into the_content() to do the same.

Neil has quite a few reasons for sticking with MT, which he outlines in his essay here. Hopefully my integration of Smarty will put to bed some of those reasons but inertia is the first reason he has for not moving and I guess he never will, no matter what anyone argues.
Thank you Matt for your kind comments WRT my work!

I’m looking for a name for my WordPress+Smarty+multiblog hack. On IRC earlier, Liam thought up “Warty” which, while getting in “arty” from Smarty and the W from WordPress is slightly inappropriate.
Kae suggested, “SmartPress” which I like. What do you think?
.. Says Donncha the lad with no imagination ..

Yay! I got the “relatedstories” plugin working! The hardest bit was converting to use $wpdb instead of the PHP MySQL interface. I love that I could call get_permalink in post.html to figure out the story link:

{relatedstories}
{if $relatedstories}
  <b>Related Stories</b> ({$relatedstoriesWords})
  <ul>
  {foreach from=$relatedstories key=key item=story}
    <li> <a href="{get_permalink id=$story->ID}" >{$story->post_title}</a></li>
  {/foreach}
  </ul>
{/if}

My Smarty powered and mult-blog capable version of WordPress is now running on this site. It’s not perfect at all, but I have a simple script that exports the current blogs here to the WP table format. This blog content lives there already!
I really need to get Smarty caching going soon however!
Link coming in a few days, but TBH, it’s simple to find if you think about it 🙂
Later … Caching’s working, based on URL and user_ID, WordPress developers, is that enough to key the cache by? Also figured out that I need to sanitize_title() all my post titles into post_name before permalinks will work! Doh!

Lots of ideas flying around the web: 1, 2, 3 by Matt, 4, 5, 6

I like the thin layer approach advocated by Ruben the best. I spent the last 2 nights attempting to coax WP into inserting a %wpblog% variable into the URL but it’s too intrusive and it’ll make tracking official releases of WordPress more difficult. Right now, my work is a “hack” on top of WP and I don’t want to spend time duplicating what other WP developers will do in the future.
When can you expect something from all this work? Maybe as early as next week! Keep yer eyes peeled!

Here’s a new plugin for you all here to play with!
{lastposts} return the most recent posts on your blog!
It has one parameter, posts, which is an integer between 1 and 20 to return that number of posts.
Example:

{lastposts posts='20'}
{if $lastposts != ''}
<br /><b>Most Recent Posts</b><br />
{foreach from=$lastposts key=key item=title}
<nobr><a href="{$siteurl}/archives/p/{$key}/c/1/more/1" title='{$title}'>{$title|truncate:50:"..."}</a></nobr><br />
{/foreach}
{/if}

Last week I revived my interest in integrating WordPress and Smarty again. I tested the latest release and I’m very impressed by the wealth of options and configurability! I want to use it myself!
To that end I need to get Smarty in there. I wrote a script that fetches a list of functions from the files in wp-includes and outputs a list of Smarty instructions to mirror the current WordPress Template Tags. That’ll make it easy to mirror the tags as they develop.

Kae Verens is doing sterling work finding out what’s working or not!

I think I’m at the stage where Smarty templates are working reasonably ok, but if caching is enabled it falls down because updates to the site need to inform Smarty. That’s relatively easy to do of course!
Next on the list is multi-blog support and that’ll be tricky. It’ll probably be some combination of the Permalink structures already in WP, and prepending the site ID to the URL somewhere. I’m looking at template-functions-links.php – Maybe in the get_settings( 'home' ) bit I can add the wpblog variable. *ponder*
Later… I want to get support for multi-blogs into my hack too before I release anything. Here’s a related post about that. I should have something for people to try next week!