smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

After quite some experimentation, much of it fruitless, that has resulted in a mass tug-of-war with Wordpress and it’s infernal re-write rules, the structure of the ‘foo has changed. This has primarily been driven by a fundamental flaw in Wordpress that will likely never be addressed, as it’s simply not considered a “problem” to begin with..

Whilst I am not at all pleased with the final result, it’s the closest I can come to a workable solution, that scales well and will be as ‘fluff’ free as I can make it.

It means I have to go back to using pages for semi-static content, rather than using a fluid rewrite rule set that blurs the lines to make pages and posts interchangeable. Thus, the resulting changes to the overall structure, are :

• links to posts are now formatted as /year/month/postname,
• categories are now assigned with a /meta base and are still used to ’structure’ and finally
• tags are still in use throughout to describe and link related content.

As I have noted previously using a /%category%/%post% permalink structure wasn’t as smooth-a-sailing as one would expect to believe. One of the reasons for using such a structure is that it reduces permalink ‘fluff’ - the downside is that Wordpress still enforces the category base rule.

So whilst one can have nice short URIs for posts, the categories end up having a redundant component. And really, “/category/journal” isn’t any more descriptive than “/journal”. Why? .. ultimately the category base doesn’t help describe the content at all and pretty much just gets in the way. It’s also disinjenious as one can end up with crazy non-logical uri structures as:

• http://www.smackfoo.com/meta/journal/page/2 for category archives, yet
• http://www.smackfoo.com/journal/post_name as individual entries.

Whilst Wordpress has become increasingly more custom friendly, with more dynamic functionality being added as time progresses, it does very show that the re-write engine has not seen much action since it became an internalised process. Really, the above should be merged into one option, that allows one to select a custom URI structure that keeps both category archives and posts in some semblance of logical association. Continue Reading »

If you happened to notice odd on-off-on-off formatting changes to the foo’s remaindered links, you weren’t actually seeing things.

You see, there’s yet another safety feature in wordpress 2.1. That being the ubiquitous add_filter, via the kses.php sitting in wp-includes. Allow me a moment to set-the-scene, as it were, so you have at least some reference point:

I have a handy (and somewhat hacked) php script that pulls in del.icio.us links and injects them as entries. It parses the RSS feed, generates a snazzy (and pre-formatted) array and injects each bookmark as an entry. I even parse in the associated del.icio.us tags to map as entry tags.

And it all works remarkably well — submit a bookmark to del.icio.us and the script takes care of the rest. Until one uses curl, or wget.

On the subject of updates - just a quick note to indicated broadleaf has undergone a minor revision and is now both 2.0.x and 2.1.x compatible. Twice the leafy love, half the fat.

For the love of cthulu, under no circumstances, whatever you do, do not click here.

On a side note, I’ve ended up with two projects on the go..

In order to better track changes to the plugin code, I’ve started a google code project - check it out for more details

From the ashes of sig2feed, comes RSS Signature ((.. insert dramatic music, here.)), which should happily function in Wordpress 2.0.x and above (including the shiny new 2.1.0 release).

I would recommend the update, due in part to some code clean-up ((..not to mention the sexy new plugin name ;) )), combined with the options panel moving under ‘Manage’ in the Wordpress admin interface.

The ‘foo has just been upgraded to Wordpress 2.1, with nary an issue in sight ((.. yes, I was going to hold off, but all credit to the WP team - 2.1 upgrade was flawless)). Well done Matt and the team, the upgrade was surprisingly bump free and the new features ((.. such as auto-save)) are very well received.

Granted — Whilst I still cannot bring myself to use the WYSIWYG editor, the rest of the improvements look particularly solid.

An additional upside is that sig2feed appears ((provisionally, at least)) to be quite operational under 2.1, so it should be ready for you on the ‘other side’ of the upgrade — another win for the day!

In the words of Kosh Naranek “..and so it begins”:

“On behalf of the WordPress.org community of commiters, contributers, and volunteers, I’m very proud to announce the immediate availability of WordPress 2.1 ‘Ella’, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald.” ~ via Development Blog

There are simply too many “new and improved” features to mention, however I would strongly advise that a quick check of plugin compatibility should be the first order of business, followed by a complete backup of everything^tm before any upgrade is attempted.

After a short hiatus — the orange powered ninja is back and is just as badass ((.. or is that just plain bad? :) )) as ever.

If you recall, I had been experiencing some issues with the wordpress function is_page() — in that it wouldn’t always return a valid value ((.. due in part to my craptastic coding skills and playing fast and loose with functions)) in the sidebar. After trying, once again to crack the is_page() puzzle, I was struck by a simpler, faster and stupefyingly simple alternative. You ready for it?

I’ve been battling with the previous theme, this_is for a few weeks now.

Due to a few design flaws it’s proving a challenge to get some of the content ((.. particularly topic sensitive sidebar related data.)) to display correctly. This comes down to a combination of limitations in the template structure I used and a small number of foibles in the 2.0.x wordpress family ((.. specifically, is_page() detection flaws.. although there are others.)).

I’m also more fond of the ’split’ layout option — that is, where the sidebar has migrated to the ‘bottom’ of pages.

Having cut my teeth converting a basic XHTML template into a wordpress theme, it’s time to up the anti and look at developing ‘the look’ from scratch.

I’ve noticed over the last month or so the level of site feedback had diminished to zero. Being the ever curious geek, I decided it was time to identify whether I’ve become “teh suck”, or some other gremlin had chosen to press spanner to works.

A quick skim of the feedback form looked ok — the email was sane.. Next step was to log into the (mt) provided webmail ((.. the new (gs) ajax powered webmail rocks, as it happens.)) and.. you’ve got mail!.

All done.. welcome back.. the ‘foo is now clustered, baby!

Brace yourselves..

I’m about to migrate to the new (mt) grid server technology that has just gone release.