Archive for the 'Wordpress' Category

Competition in the online community software market

Published on November 13, 2007 in Economics, Internet, Software and Wordpress. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Movable Type Logo

I just took a look the features and FAQ for the new Movable Type Community Solution.

The community solution boasts the following:

  • Member registration with extended user profiles
  • Forums
  • Community blogs
  • Custom fields
  • Recommendation engine
  • Sort-by-popularity

The feature set overlaps heavily with Clearspace X from Jive Software.  I’ve seen Clearspace up close, and I think it is a great product, but a community site based on the code of Movable Type 4—with its extensive plugin architecture and significant user base—could be a significant competitor.  Equally compelling for smaller organizations would the combination of WordPress and BBPress as both are completely opensource—free as in beer, but arguably less stable due to the more rapid release cycle. The growth of solutions in this space has been rapid. There seems to be plenty of room in the blog/community solution space for more players. It should be an interesting market to watch grow over the next couple of years.  

“Terms” in WordPress 2.3

Published on September 25, 2007 in Wordpress. 0 Comments

The WordPress 2.3 terms table is a smart, forward-thinking update… and it breaks most themes horribly.

New Theme in Progress

Published on September 24, 2007 in Wordpress. 0 Comments

I stumbled across the morning after a few days ago and have begun customizing it to fit Mobile Hippie. The magazine-style layout appeals to me. I can see quite a few uses for it and think I will be slicing and dicing this theme to figure out its ins and outs and to accommodate more plugins with it.

Making upgrades way too easy

Published on September 8, 2007 in User Experience and Wordpress. 0 Comments

[LINK: WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin update « Techie Buzz]

I used to love Dreamhost’s one-click installer, but it really bugged me that I lost control over backups and all the extra themes that Dreamhost sees fit to install for me.  (100 themes is a bit much guys.)

Enter the WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin. With the option of full automatic or step by step upgrade, it doesn’t get much easier than this. While the plugin is still in beta, I have yet to have any issues.

WPAU is a highly recommended plugin for WordPress.

Study peace, teach peace, know peace

Published on February 10, 2007 in Diana and Wordpress. 0 Comments

Just updated Diana’s site with the latest version of the K2 theme. It looks a lot like MobileHippie for now.

A temporary theme

Published on February 2, 2007 in Banter and Wordpress. 0 Comments

Today, I join the legions of WordPress users with the default theme–if only temporarily.

Things to know when updating a WordPress one-click install

Published on November 12, 2006 in Wordpress. 0 Comments

I just finished updating the theme for Portland Tillamook Cooperative Preschool’s Web site using the Dreamhost one-click installer. (Well, it was their one-click updater really.)

Two very valuable lessons were learned.

One, Dreamhost likes to overwrite any existing themes with the same names (directories) as the themes installed with their default. This means anyone who has simply edited a default theme will lose their edits.

The second lesson I learned is that their default backup of the site to a directory with “.old” at the end is a very handy failsafe. Oddly enough, I did not have a local copy saved before clicking “upgrade.” A rare data-related mistake that I will not repeat.
On a final note, I certainly appreciate that Dreamhost installs some rather interesting themes with their one-click installer, but I wish it weren’t so many. It really slows down the page load on presentations. It also takes a while to delete them all.

Two switches in one weekend

Published on June 18, 2006 in Wordpress. 2 Comments

Along with the switch to WordPress, I have also moved MobileHippie.com to my Dreamhost account. UplinkEarth still has a couple of my sites, but I’m consciously making an effort to move anything that uses WordPress to a Linux server running Apache so that I get the full power of the software.

IIS and WordPress were not meant for each other. I’m not really sure why ULE decided to make WordPress a one-click install on their shared Windows hosting. It doesn’t work properly as there is no PHP mail function and there is no ability to use formated permalinks. Seems like a poor business choice to offer something that’s basic functionality isn’t supported.

Made the switch

Published on June 16, 2006 in Uncategorized and Wordpress. 0 Comments

Just made the switch to WordPress for my personal blog. Since I’ve used it to teach a course and configured it for several clients at the new job, it only makes sense that I invest a little time into it to start blogging again.

This lovely theme will have to do for now until I can design my own.