Tag Archives: WordPress

I want a Firefox extension that lets me blog multiple tabs into my WordPress blog. Would it be possible to do something like that with Greasemonkey?

D’Arcy Norman looks at the multi-blog universe again. He’s examining a few systems and I like his simple litmus test:

If a user’s first reaction to the software is something like “GAH!” they are less likely to use it.

I’ve just checked in the first bits of code that will allow for customizable feeds in the WordPress MU Dashboard. It’s very much a work-in-progress and will change but here’s a few screenshots to whet your appetite! Think of this as pre-alpha code. The final version will look very different.

James follows up his previous blogs in education post with a new one on how you should use blogs in education. I bet we’ll see some interesting uses of WPMU in education with James involved!

There have been too many complaints on the forums about people having trouble installing WPMU. A number of these are on Cpanel administered sites.
Until this morning I had never used Cpanel, but thanks to James Farmer I had my chance.
Here’s how I debugged the problem with installing WPMU on Cpanel sites.
This problem probably extends to any web based installer that creates a .htaccess file in the root directory because Cpanel creates an empty file of the same name.
This is a problem because the file is owned by the user running Cpanel, not the web server. You have to change the permissions of the file through Cpanel, or ftp in and delete it.

Give me a shell any day.

How you should not use blogs in eduction, or in other environments too. James is doing some interesting things with WPMU and he has great ideas!

Want to know what’s happening at WordPress.com? Sign up there, fill in your email address and reserve a username! You’ll soon hear about it! (via Matt)

WordPress uses PHP as it’s templating language. It’s well established and as I’ve said before, there’s an abundance of free themes out there for it.
Unfortunately in a multi-user environment, allowing untrusted users to edit PHP code on your server is a huge security risk. There has to be some way to limit the commands a user can use, and there is!
PHP already parses html pages, so why not take advantage of that engine? The PHP Tokenizer lets you do just that!
Feed your template through token_get_all() and it’ll spit out an array containing HTML, PHP, and other elements from your file.
Here’s an if statement that should be familiar:

T_OPEN_TAG: '<?php '
T_IF: 'if'
T_WHITESPACE: ' '
(
T_STRING: 'have_posts'
(
)
)

We then need to compile a list of allowed functions, which can be got from wp-includes/* and we’re well on the way to a safe environment for WP bloggers. Any more ideas?

OpenID looks very promising and maybe WordPerss can play a part in it if the work is put into it.
It’s certainly something that would benefit WPMU. A community of users could post comments on each other’s blogs and bias any moderation rules in favour of the posted data getting through.
It doesn’t address trust however, but in a blogging community that can be solved in other ways (ie. when you register, the user has to click a url in an email.)
Interesting times ahead.