Now that they’re all worked out (I think / hope), I just wanted to take the time to mention why this blog was periodically either unavailable or kind of wacky (I’m referring to the display, of course, not the content… I know what some of you are thinking).
It all started earlier this week when I remembered that a while back I mentioned starting to develop my own blog software. I still may do that sometime, but I also realized that I probably won’t take/make the time to get that done anytime soon, so I did some small stuff in the meantime, in the form of writing and implementing 6 WordPress plugins to be offered to the open source community.
My reason for doing this was two-fold, with the end goal being that my installation of the WordPress blog system would contain no modifications whatsoever to the files that are distributed with WordPress (”out of the box”). This makes for:
- Easier / faster implementation of service packs, upgrades, etc. since I don’t have to remember which files I changed from how they came, and make the same changes in the new version. After I had all my changes implemented as plugins, I plopped in the new (1.2.2) WordPress files (I was on 1.2.0 previously), and made no modifications to the WP files whatsoever, just unzip straight from the source and deploy
- This also allows me to share these plugins so that others can use them, without going through the headache of creating extensive documentation telling people how to implement it. The plugin architecture allows you to just put the single plugin PHP file into the “plugins” directory, and you are done.*
*One additional note I will make on this is that there are several (actually many) plugins out there that require you to take the additional step of modifying your template (index.php) file, or other such “hacks”, which I didn’t want (since the goal was to use a “clean” install with no changes to the distributed WP files), so in these cases (”Top Commenters”, to be specific), I had to rewrite someone else’s plugin to fit my stricter requirements.
Here is a list of the plugins I wrote that I’m currently using on this site. I will explain each of these in more detail in separate posts, and offer them for download and use by others.
- Comment Spam Prevention
- Top Commenters
- CSS Style Switcher
- Sitemeter Tracking
- My own tracking system (to eventually replace Sitemeter)
- And finally, a “Template Modification” plugin, which I use to make all the other minor alterations to the default template that I want (header quote, photo gallery link, etc.)
12 Comments
You’re going to love the theme system in 1.5.
Ya, the theme stuff does sound great. I’m looking forward to 1.5; I toyed with the idea of putting up a copy from CVS, but I don’t have the time to participate as actively in testing, debugging, etc.
could you please implement recent comments, like my sites, it is hard to track down new comments to old posts without it.
Sure that will be my next step; I can probably do it pretty easily. What’s the name/url of the plugin you use?
The reason I didn’t think of it before is that I use an RSS reader to keep up on blog posts as well as comments, so that always tells me whenever there’s anything new.
http://mtdewvirus.com/wp-hacks/
Thanks. That’s the one I found, and I’m modifying it right now. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
can I get your “top 5″?
Yes, I’ll plan on publishing all of them (including the recent comment one I just finished) as soon as I get a chance to write up a decent description, etc.
Can you send me an opml of the rss feeds you use. I finally am using a feeder for outlook.
I just sent it to the address you used to register on my blog (I won’t reprint the address here). Let me know if you didn’t get it.
Thanks. how do you ever read all that news? What are your favorites that I shouldnt delete. Just a couple.
I check most of the blog ones pretty regularly, sometimes I skip (or quickly skim) the other non-blog RSS updates. For news, I always check the feeds from BBC News, Amnesty Intl., Security Focus, and the O’Reilly Weblogs (the computer book people, not that *other* O’Reilly - I don’t think I could handle anything from him on a daily basis. It’s bad enough when I accidentally turn the radio on at the wrong time and force myself to listen for a couple minutes, just so I don’t bag on him unfairly).